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Polar bear researcher Magnus Andersen, one of the study\u2019s coauthors, stands in front of a female bear and her cubs in Svalbard. Jon Aars\/Norwegian Polar Institute<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n This story was originally published by\u00a0Vox<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0Climate Desk<\/a>\u00a0collaboration.<\/p>\n Polar bears became the poster child for the peril of climate change for obvious reasons: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels warm the planet,\u00a0the ice where these bears live is melting<\/a>.<\/p>\n For more than three decades, scientists\u00a0have been warning<\/a>\u00a0that climate change could drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming.<\/p>\n But as scientists are continuing to learn, the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated.<\/p>\n In 2022, scientists\u00a0published a study<\/a>\u00a0showing that polar bears in southeastern Greenland were\u00a0able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt<\/a>, sheltering them from some of the impacts of warming. And a study\u00a0published late last year<\/a>\u00a0revealed some changes in polar bear DNA that may\u00a0help them adapt to hotter weather<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.\u201d<\/p>\n Now,\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0in the journal\u00a0Scientific Reports\u00a0adds yet another wrinkle of hope for the species. The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study\u2019s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute.<\/p>\n \u201cI was surprised,\u201d Aars told Vox from Svalbard. \u201cI would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.\u201d<\/p>\n The new study makes clear that, in other regions, the loss of sea ice from warming is indeed linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada\u2019s Western Hudson Bay, for example, researchers\u00a0have tied<\/a>\u00a0melting ice to lower bear survival and\u00a0a shortage of food<\/a>, finding that the population has\u00a0roughly halved<\/a>\u00a0since the 1980s. Climate change remains the largest threat to these animals.<\/p>\n Yet, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them.<\/p>\n Perhaps, then, polar bears aren\u2019t the best mascot for the climate crisis\u2014a point some advocates\u00a0have been making for a while<\/a>\u2014especially when there are countless other species imperiled by rising temperatures.<\/p>\n Polar bears need fat to survive the harsh Arctic cold; that\u2019s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, meanwhile, need ice to rest and birth pups. Without that ice, polar bears have a hard time finding and catching them.<\/p>\n Since the late 1970s, the Arctic\u2014the northernmost region of the planet, including parts of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia\u2014has lost<\/a>\u00a0more than 27,000 square miles of summer ice. That\u2019s an area larger than the state of West Virginia.\u00a0Some estimates<\/a>\u00a0suggest that the region could be ice-free by the middle of the century, even under optimistic emissions scenarios.<\/p>\n That melting ice is what\u2019s harming polar bear populations in Canada\u2019s\u00a0Hudson Bay<\/a>;\u00a0the Beaufort Sea<\/a>, located north of Alaska and the Yukon; and\u00a0Baffin Bay<\/a>\u00a0in Greenland. And it\u2019s why they\u2019re listed as\u00a0threatened<\/a>\u00a0under the US Endangered Species Act and the\u00a0International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources<\/a>, a global authority on endangered species.<\/p>\n But the story in Svalbard\u2014an icy archipelago in the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia\u2014is different.<\/p>\n Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted hundreds of polar bears from helicopters and measured their bodies. Then they compared those measurements to sea ice conditions, such as the number of ice-free days, and other climate variables.<\/p>\n Remarkably, the number of days with no ice in the region increased by roughly 100 during that period. And yet, as the authors found, the body condition of both male and female polar bears\u2014i.e., how fat and healthy they are\u2014increased\u00a0from 2000 onward. Female bears were actually in\u00a0worse\u00a0condition when the sea ice lasted longer.<\/p>\n Often, the message about polar bears is \u201c100 percent doom,\u201d said Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. \u201cBut that\u2019s not true,\u201d Laidre told me. \u201cThere\u2019s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.\u201d<\/p>\n If polar bears in Svalbard are healthy, that means they\u2019re finding food. So what are they eating?<\/p>\n One possibility, said Aars, the lead author, is that there may be higher densities of ringed seals, their primary food source, in years with less ice, so they\u2019re easier to catch. Even if polar bears have less time to catch the seals\u2014because there are fewer days with ice\u2014they can put on loads of weight quickly and rely on that for months.<\/p>\n The bears may also be eating other animals on land that don\u2019t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago\u00a0are increasing<\/a>, for example, and Aars says he\u2019s seen bears eat them. Walrus\u00a0populations are increasing<\/a>, too. Although polar bears can\u2019t easily kill a walrus, they can scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from other causes.<\/p>\n \u201cBears in Svalbard are potentially changing their diet, and that might account for the increase in body condition,\u201d said John Iacozza, a senior instructor and polar bear expert at the University of Manitoba. That\u2019s a luxury that polar bears elsewhere might not have. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t see the same effect happening in Western Hudson Bay, just because the availability of other species is less,\u201d said Iacozza, who was not involved in the new research.<\/p>\n While the Svalbard bears might be fine for now, researchers still worry about the long-term impacts of warming in the region. \u201cWe do think there\u2019s a threshold,\u201d Aars told me. \u201cThe difficult part is that we don\u2019t know what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n No other animal has been\u00a0so closely tied to climate change<\/a>\u00a0as the polar bear. It was on\u00a0the cover<\/a>\u00a0of TIME\u2019s 2006 global warming issue. It was featured in Al Gore\u2019s seminal documentary\u00a0An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered the same year.\u00a0It was used in funding campaigns for environmental groups. (One year, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a friend who went as a melting ice cap.)<\/p>\n The bear\u2019s symbolism is rooted in good science. Those early studies were in places like Canada\u2019s Western Hudson Bay, where these Arctic apex predators were clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media outlets amplified the most sensational conclusions\u2014and they stuck.<\/p>\n That\u2019s partly because the message is simple, Laidre said: Polar bears need ice, and warming is making it disappear. \u201cThe relationship between [climate and] an animal that needs a platform to eat is easy to wrap your brain around,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Polar bear researcher Magnus Andersen, one of the study\u2019s coauthors, stands in front of a female bear and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-450599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"To](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/polarbear2.webp.jpeg\")
Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard.Jon Aars\/Norwegian Polar Institute<\/p>\n