When you think of the words “polar bear”, something like the Coca-Cola polar bears sliding around on frosty arctic glaciers enjoying a Coke comes to mind, right? Global warming is seeking to make that commercial a sad, distant memory.

Each year, the summer melt grows alarmingly in the Arctic. We’re just beginning to see the true scale of this melt, and it’s shown us that we really have no clue how fast it’s happening, and that we’re in way over our heads.

The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia.

Over all, the floating ice dwindled to an extent unparalleled in a century or more, by several estimates.

Now the six-month dark season has returned to the North Pole. In the deepening chill, new ice is already spreading over vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Astonished by the summer’s changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979.

[...]Experts say the ice retreat is likely to be even bigger next summer because this winter’s freeze is starting from such a huge ice deficit. At least one researcher, Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., projects a blue Arctic Ocean in summers by 2013.

Source.

This summer, the Arctic ice was sparse enough that Russia decided to lay claim to the Arctic. If you’ve ever sat through a World History class, you’ll know this is a big change. Russia is thought of traditionally as landlocked to the North, because the Arctic is nigh unpassable for a good portion of the year.

Now, how does this affect polar bears? If their habitat is melting, the polar bears will be stranded on tiny little ice floes. Or worse, they will drown trying to swim from ice floe to ice floe.

It may be the latest evidence of global warming: Polar bears are drowning.

Scientists for the first time have documented multiple deaths of polar bears off Alaska, where they likely drowned after swimming long distances in the ocean amid the melting of the Arctic ice shelf. The bears spend most of their time hunting and raising their young on ice floes.

In a quarter-century of aerial surveys of the Alaskan coastline before 2004, researchers from the U.S. Minerals Management Service said they typically spotted a lone polar bear swimming in the ocean far from ice about once every two years. Polar-bear drownings were so rare that they have never been documented in the surveys.

But in September 2004, when the polar ice cap had retreated a record 160 miles north of the northern coast of Alaska, researchers counted 10 polar bears swimming as far as 60 miles offshore. Polar bears can swim long distances but have evolved to mainly swim between sheets of ice, scientists say.
Source.

Please read that source article. It’s very sad.

Have you ever heard about global warming killing the polar bears before?
Have you ever heard about polar bears drowning before?

Yes, this post was severely delayed…