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A stunning photo of a polar bear sleeping on a bed of ice has won the Natural History Museum’s 2023 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, drawing attention to the plight of polar bears, whose frigid Arctic homelands have been eroded by the global climate. change at an alarming rate.
The touching image shows a polar bear curled up on the side of an iceberg off the Svalbard archipelago, an island in northern Norway beyond the Arctic Circle.
Nima Sarikhani, the photographer who captured the award-winning image, spent three days searching for polar bears on a boat circling the Norwegian islands until he came across a pair of bears, according to a press release from the Natural History Museum. That night, the youngest bear looked for a resting place and fell asleep, creating the perfect setting for Sarikhani’s photo.
See the photo:Photographer Nima Sarikhani named Wildlife Photographer of the Year by the Natural History Museum
“While climate change is the biggest challenge we face, I hope this photograph also inspires hope,” Sarikhani said in a press release. “There is still time to clean up the mess we have made.”
The bear captured in the image is one of approximately 3,000 bears living in the Barents Sea, migrating between Svalbard and the Russian Arctic islands, according to the Natural History Museum.
Svalbard’s polar bears, one of only 19 populations in the world, are facing a crisis as climate change continues to deteriorate their icy home.
Svalbard has warmed between 5.4 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the last half century, thinning the ice that is crucial to the survival of polar bears, according to a report commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency in 2019. That means bears are forced to swim longer distances and don’t have as much contact with others.
Melting ice forces bears to search for food on the coast
Todd Atwood, who directs the polar bear research program at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center, said there is no “homogeneous response of polar bears to changes occurring throughout the Arctic.” Still, the continued melting of ice is taking its toll on some populations.
In the southern Beaufort Sea, where he conducts his research, Atwood said bears are doing “relatively poorly” due to the loss of sea ice on their continental shelf.
“Historically, these bears basically spent most of the year on the sea ice,” Atwood said. “Now, more than 30% of the population has learned to go ashore during that summer and fall period.”
Because food is scarcer on land, polar bears forced to travel ashore are often in a “physiological state of nutritional stress,” which could attract them to more crowded areas, Atwood said.
Atwood said bears could also have trouble giving birth to their cubs safely if they can’t feed enough to retain enough body mass.
Further:Where does polar bears live? Learn more about the Arctic habitat of the ‘seal bear’.
Polar bears face crisis as climate warms
A published study in September last year revealed the extent of climate change’s devastating impact on polar bear populations. For the first time, researchers directly linked greenhouse gas emissions to their effect on the survival of polar bear cubs.
“We have known for decades that continued warming and loss of sea ice can ultimately only result in reduced distribution and abundance of polar bears,” said Steven Amstrup of Polar Bear International, lead author of the study, in a Press release. “But until now, we have lacked the ability to distinguish the impacts of greenhouse gases emitted by particular activities from the impacts of historical cumulative emissions.”
The scientists behind the study believe their work can provide a scientific framework for policymakers to strengthen the Endangered Species Act to further protect polar bears.
According to the US Department of the Interior, new drilling and fossil fuel projects should be evaluated independently of historical greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers believe the study could help the U.S. federal government consider the impacts fossil fuel projects would have on polar bears when evaluating project proposals.
A previous study led by Amstrup published in 2020 showed that polar bears are at risk of extinction by the end of the century if action is not taken to curb climate change. Polar bears were the first species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act due to global warming.
The researchers explored the relationship between melting ice and periods when bears were forced to fast. The longer the bears could not eat, the greater the risk that their body condition, reproduction and survival would be reduced.
Amstrup said he hoped the same methodology could be used in the future to help researchers protect other wildlife populations, calling the research “the most important paper of my career.”
Atwood said the situation facing polar bears is not desperate, if the damage caused by fossil fuel emissions is stopped in time.
“There is still an opportunity for greenhouse gas mitigations to occur that would conserve polar bear habitat and polar bear populations,” he said.