The Loneliest Polar Bear by Kale Williams

Author:Kale Williams [Williams, Kale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Hunters in Wales started noticing changes to the climate years ago.

The walrus and seals come past the village sooner than they did when these men hunted as teenagers. Ice that used to support the weight of a hunter and a snowmobile well into spring now flexes and sinks weeks earlier. Agnaboogok used to have to hack more than four feet through ice to hit water; now, in most years, it’s more like two feet. Oxereok sees bare ground where he used to see snowbanks. He sees insects he hasn’t encountered before and species usually found farther south, in warmer climates. He’s noticed an increase in the number of seal pups, which he calls “future food,” abandoned on the beach. He read in National Geographic that shipping and oil drilling and mining are expanding in the Arctic as the waters, in some places ice-free for months out of the year now, become easier to navigate. He worries that increases in ship traffic and industry will pollute the sea. He’s already seen troubling signs. Oxereok pulls seals from the water that are coated in oil and covered in sores, victims of parasites that thrive in warmer temperatures. He can’t eat seals like that. “We just slit the belly and let them sink.”

As the Arctic climate warms, the extent of sea ice is trending downward. The ice that does form is thinner and breaks off from land earlier, which increases drift. Agnaboogok remembers one hunting trip where he and his crew killed a walrus. They towed it to a low and flat iceberg, the most suitable place on the open water to butcher a creature that likely weighed more than a ton. Cutting up an animal that large is not a speedy endeavor, and in the time it took to chop up the walrus, the iceberg had drifted twenty miles, rocking in the waves the whole time. Agnaboogok was afraid and a long way from home. Everyone made it home safely, but it took them extra time and, more important, extra gas, which isn’t cheap.

This phenomenon doesn’t just affect hunters butchering walrus. It adds an extra burden for polar bears, too. Using data from radio collars, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey compared Alaskan bears’ movements in the period 1987–98, when sea ice was more stable, and 1999–2013, when the amount of drift had become greater. They found that the bears exerted more energy in the later period of the study to counteract the drift. Energy for polar bears comes from seals, and the bears needed to consume one to three more seals per year to make up the deficit, a 2 to 4 percent increase, while the sea ice they relied on to catch their meals was declining. Food, for people and polar bears, was getting harder to come by.

In 2014, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, a nongovernmental organization that represents 180,000 Native people from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and the Chukotka region of Russia, published a regionwide assessment of food security around the Bering Strait.

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