Here is the September 2014 follow-up to my post on the July 2013 track map for female polar bears being followed by satellite in the Beaufort Sea by the US Geological Survey (USGS) – “Ten out of ten polar bears being tracked this summer in the Beaufort Sea are on the ice.”
See that post for methods and other background on this topic, and some track maps from 2012 (also available at the USGS website here).
The USGS track map for September 2014 is copied below (Fig. 1).
At the end of September, with sea ice starting to rebuild, it appears there were 8 bears on the ice and three on land.
The situation for September was not very much different from August, except that two of the 11 bears (up from one) were on the ice in the Chukchi Sea in September, a phenomenon that was recently acknowledged to have affected the last population estimate for the Southern Beaufort subpopulation.
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