A broad band of sea ice is jammed up against the western shore of Hudson Bay, hanging on despite warm mid-July temperatures. Its unusual thickness suggests it won’t be gone anytime soon, which means most Western Hudson Bay polar bears will likely remain offshore for at least a few more weeks.
The dark blue in the “departure from normal” chart below shows just how unusual this phenomenon is for the northern reaches of Hudson Bay:
Comments Off on W. Hudson Bay sea ice not going away anytime soon as polar bears sit tight offshore
Posted in Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged behavioral plasticity, Churchill, Hudson Bay, problem bears, resilience, sea ice
Polar bear habitat for June — the last month of spring in the Arctic — is still within 2 standard deviations of the long-term average despite sea ice experts’ predictions that catastrophic declines can be expected any year now.
The Arctic sea ice cover in June 2024 retreated at a below average pace, leading to a larger total sea ice extent for the month than in recent years. NSIDC, 3 July 2024
Oddly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) employees who wrote up the sea ice summary for June felt it appropriate to bring up a recently-published prediction of impending doom for Southern Hudson Bay polar bears based on a sea ice prediction (Stroeve et al. 2024), which I covered here. The inclusion of this topic is a naked promotion of the Stroeve sea ice modelling paper which not only doesn’t fit the reality of this year’s sea ice conditions but their discussion doesn’t include a single piece of evidence that Southern Hudson Bay polar bears came off the ice earlier than usual.
Continue readingComments Off on Last month of Arctic spring fails to bring sea ice to its knees, even in Southern Hudson Bay
Posted in Advocacy, Life History, Sea ice habitat
Tagged behavioral plasticity, body condition, breakup, Hudson Bay, melting ice, polar bear, Southern Hudson Bay, spring
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