#polar-bear-management

#polar-bear-management

In April 2024, Churchill's waste management facility-an old military building known as L5-burned to the ground. Spontaneous combustion in the gaseous garbage pile was the likely cause. The warehouse had been capable of storing up to three years' worth of the town's garbage at a time. Overnight, the town's 900 or so residents were left with nothing.

He had flown in from Mar-a-Lago and, he told me, was there to observe. The next day, he watched as Åsa Rennermalm, a Rutgers University professor who studies polar regions, sat onstage with European foreign ministers and spoke out against cuts to U.S. science funding. "A leading US Arctic scientist is on stage absolutely ripping her country to the delight of the audience," Dans wrote on X. "Embarassing." He punctuated his post with an American-flag emoji.

Juha Kujala no longer knows how many reindeer will return to his farm from the forest each December. The 54-year-old herder releases his animals into the wilderness on the 830-mile Finnish-Russian border each spring to grow fat on lichens, grass and mushrooms, just as his ancestors have done for generations. But since 2022, grisly discoveries of reindeer skeletons on the forest floor have disrupted this ancient way of life.

In the pristine High Arctic sits the Kitsissut island cluster, also known as the Carey Islands, nestled between northwest Greenland and northeast Canada. The surrounding seas are perilous, and traveling there is difficult even with modern boats. But new archaeological evidence suggests ancient humans managed to sail to the islands, too. Early settlers lived on the islands between 4,500 and 2,700 years ago.

Recently, Anchorage, Alaska's largest city with nearly 400,000 residents, has just recorded its snowiest January on record. Tucked in between the mighty Cook Inlet and pushed right up against the Chugach Mountains, Anchorage sits in prime location for some serious snow totals. Moisture from pacific storms builds up over the inlet, and thanks to orographic lift caused by the mountains, forces that moisture to drop over Anchorage. Thanks to Alaska's northernly location, that moisture often falls in the form of snow.

Global warming is thawing the Arctic and igniting a high-stakes race for the riches beneath its ice. Global warming is heating up the Arctic, and global powers like the United States, Russia and China are manoeuvring to stake a claim to the resources under its melting ice. Some experts say the region, once known as an exception an island of international cooperation in the midst of geopolitical struggles is becoming the site of a second cold war.

Decades of successful scientific collaboration could be at risk if Europe-US political relations continue to fray over trade and defense issues. For more than 30 years, Arctic nations have worked together across the physical, biological and social sciences to understand one of the world's fastest changing regions. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost around 33,000 square miles of sea ice each year roughly the same area as Czechia.

I was five years old when I had my first encounter with a black bear. In the spring of 1990, my father, a wildlife biologist, brought home an orphaned three-month-old cub in a cardboard box. The cub's mother, having burrowed beneath the roots of an old tree, had been killed in the den by a logging excavator, but the cub, weighing barely more than a bag of apples, survived. Forestry workers caught the young bear and dropped it off at the Fish and Wildlife office in Peace River, Alberta, where my dad worked, and he called my mom with the news.

Polar bears are the poster children of climate changeand for good reason. These giant bears hunt, mate and spend their days hanging out on Arctic sea ice, which is rapidly disappearing as the climate warms. But some polar bears, it seems, are far more resilient than we realized: new research suggests that in one region, the bears are adapting to the declining sea ice.

Protests are also planned in the Danish cities of Aarhus, Aalborg, and Odense. The demonstration in Greenland's capital, Nuuk, is scheduled to begin at 4:00 pm (1500 GMT), according to the organizers, who say it is "against the United States' illegal plans to take control of Greenland." Demonstrators are set to march to the US consulate carrying Greenlandic flags. At least 900 people in Greenland said on its Facebook page that they planned to participate in the event.

ICE has designs on every major US city. It plans to not only occupy existing government spaces but share hallways and elevator bays with medical offices and small businesses. It will be down the street from daycares and within walking distance of churches and treatment centers. Its enforcement officers and lawyers will have cubicles a modest drive away from giant warehouses that have been tapped to hold thousands of humans that ICE will detain.

The Northeast Passage was expected to open first due to the Coriolis effect. As the world turns to the east, in the Northern hemisphere, flowing water will veer to the right. Warm, salty Atlantic water flows into the Arctic Ocean through the Barents Sea Opening between Norway and Svalbard, and the Fram Strait between Svalbard and Greenland, then bends right along the Arctic coasts of Norway and Russia.

So, believe it or not, the cold air that we get down here actually tends to help the performance of the helicopter. DAN: The low pressure systems we have here, particularly in this, weather we've been having, tends to create the opposite effect by decreasing the pressure. Low pressure systems, thinner air. DAN: And that cooler air makes the pressure higher again.

The next morning, I checked the critter-cams and saw the bear again, now captured by a camera I'd placed by a little mesh-covered opening near the small basement under my house. I watched as a massive shape emerged from the hole. My brain refused to believe it. The bear looked too large to fit in that tiny gap. I watched it again, shocked. My hands started to sweat.