Susan Crockford
We are just entering the 2024 Arctic melt season with no signs of any major, significant changes despite claims that 2023 is the warmest year on record (since 1850). There is still plenty of sea ice habitat for polar bears ahead of the summer months (July-September) when the Arctic ice melts significantly.
Polar bears in western Hudson Bay remain on the ice despite the large water levels that typically signal a “breakup” has occurred: the wind-driven ice is packed tightly against the western shore and the bears remain on it.
Overview of Arctic sea ice
In 2024, the sea ice area on June 21 is estimated to be 10.5 mkm2:
Compare the above with 2022 (below), when it was not the “warmest year on record” and the ice extent was 10.4 mkm2:
Canada
Although one “heat wave” in early summer In eastern North America there is still a lot of sea ice:
As I discussed earlier this month, the vast area of open water east of Hudson Bay is caused by wind, not melting ice. This leaves the region with its lowest ice cover since 1979 at this time of year (see chart below):
The ice does not show up on satellite images as thick as in previous years, as the chart below shows: usually ice thickness shows up as dark blue at this time of year (first year ice is >1.2m thick) . However, this maybe is an artifact: wind-driven ice is almost always buckled and compressed into a thick mass, so the remaining ice in Western Hudson Bay can be much thicker than it appears (and thus, melts more slowly in the summer):
But according to University of Alberta researchers, previously tagged polar bears are all still on tape and available no report from Churchill of polar bears on shore. As far as I know, there have been no reports of bears beaching in NW Hudson Bay, like Arviat, where bears are a regular get ashore earlier further south.
Many of the bears seen earlier in the season were said to be in good condition (see below, courtesy of Andrew Derocher, April 24, 2024), indicating a successful spring feeding season, likely waiting for the ice to literally rot beneath their feet before they came ashore.
Barents Sea
The ice is receding from the Svalbard area but there is still plenty of polar bear habitat in and around the north. Franz Josef Land in the Eastwhere most “Barents Sea” polar bears make breeding dens and spend the summer:
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