The ice is melting -- we are witnessing the last moments of the polar bear in the wild

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Bottom left: Polar bears approach the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine USS Honolulu (SSN 718) while surfaced 280 miles from the North Pole. The bears investigated the boat for almost two hours. The Honolulu collected data and samples for U.S. and Canadian universities by agreement with the Arctic Submarine Laboratory (ASL) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). US Navy photo taken October 2003 by Chief Yeoman Alphonso Braggs.

Top left: A polar bear leaps a lead off the Greenland coast of the Arctic Ocean. (Greenpeace photo by Daniel Beltrá.)

Top center: A sow polar bear resting with her cubs on the pack ice in the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo by Steve Amstrup.)

Top right: A polar bear (probably an adolescent male) approaches the Tundra Buggy, a specialized vehicle which takes tourists to the annual bear migration in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada.

Polar bears are superb swimmers and primarily hunt seals. Cubs live with and are fed and trained by their mother for their first two years.

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I don't know why I go to these places. On the train from Toronto to Winnipeg, I told a Canadian couple I was on my way to Hudson Bay, and the woman asked, "Why do you want to go there? There's nothing there."

Which is not true. The Arctic and its ocean and fresh-water watershed are remarkably rich and diverse in land, sea and fresh-water life, and at the top of this rich food chain is the world's largest land predator, the polar bear, Ursus maritimus. When I saw them in the wild, I realized I was seeing something rare and remarkable. It never occurred to me I was also witnessing the end of their moment on Earth.

This blog was already grinding away when the first alarm sounded. Scientists with the U.S. Interior Department's Minerals Management Service were encountering an unusually high number of polar bear drownings. Polar bears primarily hunt seals across the Arctic ice, and regularly must swim considerable distances across open water to get to the next seal-rich ice patch. They are great swimmers -- but if the ice was melting, open-water distances were increasing beyond their ability to reach the next ice patch.

The ice is melting. Driven by economic motives, merchant nations have been exploring Arctic North America, and entire expeditions have perished and vanished since the 16th century, seeking a sailing route from the Atlantic to the Pacific -- the fabled Northwest Passage. In 2007, for the first time since aerial and satellite surveying covered this region, a Northwest Passage appeared, an ice-free shipping route connecting Atlantic and Pacific.

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The Associated Press
Monday 7 January 2008

Deadline Postponed
on Polar Bear Listing

by Dan Joling

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Citing the complexity of the decision, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Monday it would not meet a deadline for a recommendation on listing polar bears as a threatened species due to global warming under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The deadline for a listing decision by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is Wednesday. A listing could trigger restrictions on development that affect polar bears or their habitat.

Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the agency hopes to have a recommendation within weeks so that Kempthorne can announce his decision within a month.

The department has never declared a species threatened or endangered because of climate change, Hall said, and the issue complicated the decision.

"That's why this one has been so taxing and challenging to us," he said.

Environmental groups, however, said that law calls for a decision unless there is "substantial scientific uncertainty" — and that there is none.

Andrew Wetzler, director of the Endangered Species Project at the National Resource Defense Council, called the delay "outrageous and unwarranted."

Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity and the lead author of the petition to list polar bears, said environmental groups will begin legal action when the deadline passes Wednesday with a formal notice to sue as required by the Endangered Species Act.

"We certainly hope that the polar bear will be listed within the next month," Siegel said. "But this is an administration of broken promises, from Bush's campaign pledge to regulate greenhouse gases to Secretary Kempthorne's failure to list a single species under the Endangered Species Act in the last 607 days."

A petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council more than two years ago claimed the polar bear's primary habitat, sea ice, is threatened because of global warming.

The summer of 2007 set a record low for sea ice in the Arctic with just 1.65 million square miles, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, nearly 40 percent less ice than the long-term average between 1979 and 2000.

Polar bears spend most of their lives on sea ice. They use it to hunt their primary prey, ringed seals, the only ice seal that lives under the frozen ice cap. Polar bears hunt ribbon and bearded seals in broken ice.

Kempthorne in January 2007 proposed listing polar bears as "threatened" and the Endangered Species Act calls for a decision one year later. "Endangered" means a species is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range. The "threatened" listing proposed for polar bears is one step below, a category that means a species is likely to become endangered.

Hall said his agency sought additional information for the decision last year and received nine scientific studies from the U.S. Geological Survey in September. Among them was a report concluding that two-thirds of the world's polar bears, including the entire population in Alaska, will be killed off by 2050 because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic.

The agency reopened the comment period to let the public weigh in on the USGS reports and to let Fish and Wildlife officials themselves digest the information to prepare a final report for publication in the Federal Register.

He said he did not like missing the deadline.

However, "It is far more important to use to do it right and have it explained properly to the public," he said.

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On the Net:

* USFW-Alaska, polar bear discussion: http://alaska.fws.gov/fisheries/mmm/polarbear/issues.htm

* Center for Biological Diversity: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/