Polar Bears Need Love …And a plan. A team of leading polar bear
ecologists called for nations to make plans now for dealing with
ongoing—and soon to be critical—threats to the survival of polar
bears. The biggest problem for this iconic Arctic species is the
mindblowingly fast disappearance of sea ice. Their paper appears
in Conservation Letters. For instance, last month (January 2013)
the average coverage of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was 409,000
square miles (1.06 million square kilometers) below the 1979 to
2000 January average. That’s the sixth-lowest January extent in
the satellite record, says the National Snow & Ice Data Center.
Plus 2012 saw the lowest ever summer coverage of sea ice in the
Arctic. To keep reading, click here.