A newly discovered group of polar bears may offer clues to how these animals will fare as the Arctic warms at an alarming rate and sea ice shrinks.
, researchers report today in. That makes this small group of a few hundred polar bears its own subpopulation, one of just 20 in the world. “This southeast Greenland group of bears is the most genetically distinctive population of polar bears that has ever been documented,” says Elizabeth Peacock, a polar bear biologist at Emory University who was not involved with the work.
But Kristin Laidre, an ecologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, and her colleagues were able to access the unforgiving region with heavy-duty helicopters. To ensure they made it back to their research base at a Greenlandic coastal community 4 hours away, the scientists stashed fuel in the snow at strategic spots in the bears’ habitat years in advance.
Most likely, the bears are genetically distinctive because they have been isolated by their habitat. Polar bears in southeastern Greenland are hemmed in by the mountainous expanse of the Greenland Ice Sheet to the west and rapid currents to the east. Moving overland is difficult as the southeastern tip of Greenland is gashed with fjords and flanked by steep cliffs.
In their rugged environment, these isolated polar bears are homebodies, sticking mostly to the glacial ice floating in their local fjords. The researchers observed that the median distance covered by female polar bears over 4 days in this area of Greenland was just 10 kilometers, compared with the nearly 40 kilometers female bears in northeastern Greenland cover in the same amount of time.
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