Dr. Susan Crockford
Not even three weeks later annual minimum the amount of sea ice has reached this year, new land ice has formed off the coast of Siberia, which is Important autumn hunting habitat for polar bears.
So not just this year sea ice range in september at the lowest pole of predicted levels for late summerOkay CO2 concentration is increasing In the atmosphere, new ice also seems to form earlier in the fall, which signals winter ice formation. To me, it looks like a decades-long increase in ice in September since 2012 (see below) could indicate a biologically relevant change for the animals. Living in the Arctic depends more on ice than on trend not since 2007.
Crossing the North Pole
In virtually all the peripheral waters of the Arctic Ocean (Barents, Kara, Laptev, Chukchi, Beaufort, as well as Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, fast ice thick enough to support polar bears forming before the mobile ice in the center of the Arctic expands to the peripheral coast (below). The Laptev Sea are often the first to experience this new rapid coastal ice formation due to bitterly cold winds blowing north from Siberia.
As I explained details before, this new ice formation creates a nutrient-rich substrate that attracts fish to feed on the plankton that proliferate on the surface; like clockwork, seals come to feed on these fish, and those seals provide a predictable food source for polar bears that have spent the summer fasting ashore.
Sea ice along the coast of Laptev
New sea ice formed on October 5, a select number of years since 2006 (pictured below), courtesy NISDC MASIEshows new ice forming in 2022, 2021 and 2017 but not in previous years (only a few are shown for brevity):
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