An isolated population of polar bears in southeast Greenland has learned to hunt on freshwater glacier ice. That means they may be able to survive longer as climate change makes sea ice scarce.
A female bear and two 1-year-old cubs walk over snow-covered freshwater glacier ice in Southeast Greenland.
"Glacial ice basically might help small numbers of bears survive for longer periods under climate warming," she says.While indigenous people have long known that that bears lived in southeast Greenland, it's a remote, challenging environment that's not frequented by humans.
When it was safe to land their helicopter, the researchers would briefly capture bears to take genetic samples or put on location trackers."We would collect information on their movements, their body condition, their health, their genetics," says Laidre.She estimates that at least few hundred polar bears live in southeast Greenland, and it turns out that they're the most genetically isolated polar bears on the planet.
The way that these bears hunt using freshwater ice"might buy bears in that area a little bit more time, as pack ice continues to decline, because they are not solely reliant on the pack ice," says Atwood.
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