Polar bears threatened by ice which is too thick!

  We have been told for years about the polar bears and how their very existence has been threatened by global warming and melting ice caps. Well, according to this article the polar bears in Alaska are indeed threatened by the ice…..because the ice is too thick!

Five meters of ice– about 16 feet thick – is threatening the survival of polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea region along Alaska’s Arctic coast, according to Dr. Susan J. Crockford, an evolutionary biologist in British Columbia who has studied polar bears for most of her 35-year career.

 

That’s because the thick ice ridges could prevent ringed seals, the bears’ major prey, from creating breathing holes they need to survive in the frigid waters, Crockford told CNSNews.com

  Remember this story about the climate scientists who traveled to the Antarctic to prove the ice was melting only to get stuck in the non-existent ice? Sure you do, who could forget it? A different region of the world yet we seem to be seeing a trend with the ice, don’t we?

    But the story does not end here because Dr. Crockford went on to basically state that the studies used to place the polar bears on the endangered species list might have been the result of flawed logic:

There were comparably high levels of spring ice in the Beaufort Sea in 2004 and 2006, when bear counts were “one of the pieces of evidence used to have the bears listed as ‘threatened’ in the U.S.,” Crockford pointed out.

“Polar bear biologists were finding some bears quite thin and found a population decline,” she said, which they attributed to melting summer ice caused by global warming.

“But the biologists were not there to see the thick [spring] ice. All they saw was thin bears,” she pointed out. “They blamed the poor condition of the bears on summer ice, instead of acknowledging that it was likely the condition of the ice in the spring that was the cause of the problem.”

  So, these scientists saw thin bears in rough condition and automatically blamed global warming and melting ice when in reality the Spring ice was too thick. But what about the declining numbers?

“Female [polar bears] with cubs having trouble feeding are one aspect of the repercussions of thick ice,” Crockford added. “The other repercussion is that other bears, instead of hanging around and starving, probably left the area. They could have gone to the Chukchi Sea, which is located between the U.S. and Russia near the Bering Strait.”

  They probably just moved to where the food was.