Tag Archives: sea ice

Tracking polar bears in the Beaufort Sea – all three bears on the ice during October 2015

Posted on November 4, 2015 | Comments Off on Tracking polar bears in the Beaufort Sea – all three bears on the ice during October 2015

All three of the females with radio collars installed by USGS last spring (see footnote below) spent October out on the sea ice – which suggests the Kaktovik female with the tight collar that made the news last week was either wearing a failed collar, USGS removed her icon from the map, or she was not wearing a USGS collar.

polar-bear-radio-collar_CBC Oct 28 2015

It is possible that the poor bear was the one represented by the purple icon from last month (see map below), the only USGS collared bear that was on shore during September and still sending signals. The bear in the above photo was photographed in Kaktovik, easy walking distance for a bear, near the end of October.  The purple icon on shore in the September USGS map is no longer present this month.

As far as I know, there has been no follow-up information on the fate of this bear: we still don’t know whether the collar has yet been successfully removed.
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2015 may be the earliest in many years that W. Hudson Bay polar bears head for the sea ice

Posted on October 29, 2015 | Comments Off on 2015 may be the earliest in many years that W. Hudson Bay polar bears head for the sea ice

Great news for Western Hudson Bay polar bears! Following up from sea ice conditions last week, CIS maps show ice forming all along western Hudson Bay – not a huge amount, but the beginning of the end of the ice-free season, which recently has not occurred until mid-November (Cherry et al. 2013).

Canadian Arctic Oct 29 2015_CIS

There is above-average sea ice coverage in Foxe Basin and Davis Strait, and only slightly below average coverage in the Beaufort Sea (see graphs below). Polar bear habitat is shaping up very nicely indeed across Canada and the US this year.
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Beaufort Sea polar bear habitat highest since 2008 at this date

Posted on October 25, 2015 | Comments Off on Beaufort Sea polar bear habitat highest since 2008 at this date

Good news for Southern Beaufort polar bears! Sea ice converging on the north shore of Alaska earlier than any year since 2011 at least, according to NSIDCs regional ice plots (below).

r01_Beaufort_Sea_ts_4km

But wait, their Masie ice maps show it’s actually the earliest since 2008 (although the ice movement onshore was also earlier than 2006 and 2007, see below). And it’s still a full week before the end of October, the first month of Arctic fall (October-December). Lot’s of seal hunting habitat.

This emphasizes the fact that the primary problem faced by Southern Beaufort sea polar bears is not scarce summer ice but by thick sea ice conditions in the spring. Bears photographed near Kaktovik this year were in excellent condition (see here and here, taken by Kelsey Eliasson, Polar Bear Alley). If folks have been seeing starving bears, they haven’t said anything that I’ve been able to find.

Ice maps below.
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Churchill problem polar bear report for 13-18 October 2015

Posted on October 23, 2015 | Comments Off on Churchill problem polar bear report for 13-18 October 2015

Latest report on problem bears in Churchill, Manitoba, from the town’s Facebook page.

2015 Oct 13_18_at Oct 19_lg

Polar Bear Alert Program Activity Report as of Oct. 19 (click to enlarge):

30 polar bears handled to date this year; 11 bears in the holding facility this week (6 released, including a sow and two cubs). As mentioned in the new Polar Bear Town reality TV show, Churchill officials have been more vigilant and pro-active since the two polar bear attacks in 2013 than they were previously, capturing any bears than come close to the town.

See previous post here for map and background. Last week’s report here.

 

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Winter returns to the Arctic – freeze-up 2015 at October 20 expands polar bear habitat

Posted on October 21, 2015 | Comments Off on Winter returns to the Arctic – freeze-up 2015 at October 20 expands polar bear habitat

Fall is the season when polar bears that have spent the summer fasting can return to the refreezing sea ice to resume successful hunting. For polar bears, fall is the second-most important time of year for hunting, after spring.

masie_all_zoom_4km_2015 Oct 20

The date when freeze-up occurs across the Arctic varies from place to place and year to year, but the process is well underway this year. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center’s MASIE map for 20 October 2015 (above) shows 7.7 mkm2 of sea ice, up from the annual low of 4.41 mkm2 almost 6 weeks ago.

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BBC perspective on Arviat polar bears – those not included in the last mark-recapture study

Posted on October 16, 2015 | Comments Off on BBC perspective on Arviat polar bears – those not included in the last mark-recapture study

In a polite but misleading article today in a BBC magazine (The polar bears are coming to town) about the relationship of polar bears and Inuit in Arviat, Western Hudson Bay, there is no mention of the on-going feud between Nunavut Inuit and Canadian polar bear scientists regarding invasive research.

Churchill_Polar_Bear_2004-11-15 Wikipedia

Nor is there a mention of the fact that according to the most recent research, there has been no trend in sea ice conditions since 2001.
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Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers are stable, no trend in ice breakup or freeze-up

Posted on October 13, 2015 | Comments Off on Western Hudson Bay polar bear numbers are stable, no trend in ice breakup or freeze-up

This needs saying again: the latest study on Western Hudson Bay polar bears reveal the population has been stable since 2004 and there has been no significant trend in either breakup or freeze-up dates since 2001.

Triplets in Wapusk NP from McCall webpage 2013

Environment Canada and the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group concur that the current size of the WHB subpopulation is about 1030 bears. Documents found online indicate a new version of the 2013 WHB mark-recapture report (Lunn et al. 2013) is now available (Lunn et al. 2014) and that a new population survey is planned for 2016. A 2013 story based on false information produced by The Guardian that is still in circulation should be retracted.
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Sea ice is not a stable habitat for polar bears – summarized today in The Arctic Journal

Posted on October 7, 2015 | Comments Off on Sea ice is not a stable habitat for polar bears – summarized today in The Arctic Journal

In The Arctic Journal, 7 October 2015: Unstable thinking about polar bear habitat [not my title choice]

Unstable thinking about polar bear habitat_Oct 7 2015 title page

This is a previously unpublished summary, written exclusively for The Arctic Journal, of my peer-reviewed, fully referenced essay on this topic that was published earlier this year by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in their “Briefing Paper” series (#16, June 8, 2015: The Arctic Fallacy: Sea Ice Stability and the Polar Bear), which includes a foreword by Dr. Matthew Cronin, Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Pdf here.

Here are the essential points, one by one:
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Tracking polar bears – 3 out of 4 S. Beaufort bears on the ice during September 2015

Posted on October 3, 2015 | Comments Off on Tracking polar bears – 3 out of 4 S. Beaufort bears on the ice during September 2015

The shore of Alaska is not very important to Southern Beaufort polar bears – most of them stay on the sea ice during the summer and early fall, where they may or may not continue eating. These results of on-going satellite tracking studies by USGS1 confirm results of previous studies.

Tranquilized_pb570_S Beaufort March 2014_USGS

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Beaufort Sea swimming polar bears far from land but not very far from sea ice

Posted on October 1, 2015 | Comments Off on Beaufort Sea swimming polar bears far from land but not very far from sea ice

Recent accounts of an encounter with a curious polar bear female and her two older cubs in the Beaufort Sea on 16 September give contradictory details about the position of sea ice at the time. The same researcher told one reporter that the ship was 240 km from land, another that it was 240 km from the sea ice, and in another account (that he wrote himself), said the ship had been far from land and sea ice.

Beaufort swimming polar bears_Sept 30 2015_Global news

University of Victoria (Canada) chemical oceanographer Jay Cullen said on the expedition web site:

“After arriving on station and beginning work the crew noticed three polar bears in the water together which swam around to the ship when our water sampling system was nearly 3500 meters below the surface. The ship was located far from sea ice and land. Indeed, Arctic sea ice extent was the fourth lowest on record this year and there has been speculation that this imposes stress on polar bears which rely on the ice to hunt.”  [my bold]

But the maps below show that at the time of the incident (taken from the expedition web site) and the NSIDC Masie sea ice map for 16 September 2015, the ship [the CCGS Amundsen, acting as a research vessel] was actually quite close to an isolated large patch of sea ice, although further from the edge of the main pack. A patch of sea ice plenty big enough for a polar bear to rest upon – no wonder the bears did not appear stressed.

And the polar bear biologist Cullen consulted (Dr. Andrew Derocher) implied by his response that the bear was indeed far from sea ice. Reminds me of the swimming polar bear off the Hibernia oil platform off Newfoundland March 2015, which turned out to be not far from ice at all. See what you think.
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