Greenland’s fjords harbor a unique group of polar bears that rely on glacial ice, a NASA-funded research study reported on June 16, 2022, in the journal Science. Polar bears throughout the Arctic rely on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals. As climate change warms the planet and Arctic sea ic
, polar bears are struggling to find ice to hunt on. In Southeast Greenland, however, scientists discovered that bears survive for most of the year in fjords by relying on ice melanges, a mix of sea ice and pieces of glacial ice that is carved off of marine-terminating glaciers. This population of polar bears has been isolated for several hundred years from their Arctic counterparts, and they have been found to be genetically distinct.
Their findings revealed that the Southeast Greenland bears are cut off from sea ice two-thirds of the year, and supplement their hunting by using freshwater ice slabs, which routinely break off from the Greenland Ice Sheet and coastal glaciers. The bears also traipse between fjords by crossing inland ice and trekking over mountains.
Shown here is the Tingmiarmiut fjord within the habitat of the Southeast Greenland polar bear population, in summer. The white dots on the dark water are floating glacial ice that has broken off of the central Heimdal glacier and other glaciers in the fjord, which the bears use instead of sea ice to hunt. This image was collected by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 on August 8, 2021.
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