PARIS: Polar bears are dropping life-maintaining sea ice essential for looking, resting, and breeding in all 19 areas of the Arctic they inhabit; take a look at warned on Wednesday. As climate change pushes up Arctic temperatures, ice is melting earlier in spring and re-freezing later in autumn, a group of researchers suggested within the Cryosphere, a magazine of the ecu Geosciences Union. Satellite records discovered that the whole quantity of ice-included days throughout the nineteen areas declined at a rate of 7 to 19 days per decade from 1979 to 2014, the researchers said. Their dependence on sea ice manner that climate warming poses the unmarried most crucial chance to (polar bears) endurance,” wrote the team.
The worldwide populace of polar bears — scientific name Ursus maritimus — is estimated at 25,000, said the study. The bears, which have become emblematic of the ravages of world warming, spend a maximum of their time on sheets of frozen ocean water, which melt and recede in hotter months, and then reform in winter.
While the ice melts, the animals come ashore and live to tell the tale on stored fat until it refreezes — a length that for some has come to be longer and longer. Scientists say the Arctic is warming at nearly double The worldwide fee due to weather trade fuelled by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels, a process that emits heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
With longer iceless intervals, polar bears need to swim similarly and further to locate strong ground. Final yr, the Worldwide Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said the creatures ought to see their numbers dwindle by nearly a 3rd with the aid of mid-century. Their fame on the IUCN’s Purple List of endangered species is currently indexed as “prone”. The bears need sea ice for searching as they can not outswim seals, their favored prey.
They get around this using waiting close to holes within the ice and ambushing the seals as they come up for air. Male and woman bear also meet on ice sheets to mate.
