This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Fionna Samuels.The life of a polar bear is hard.It’s made even harder as temperatures climb.The bears of the north largely depend on sea ice to survive, hunting seals that take a breath through gaps in the ice.For most bears, their feeding opportunities disappear as sheets of sea ice melt.Now researchers have identified a new subpopulation of polar bears that may be able to survive longer thanks to their ability to use glacial ice as a sea ice alternative.I’ve been working on polar bears for about 15 years, and this particular study was just really a wholly unexpected finding that came out of a much larger survey of polar bears along the east coast of Greenland.That’s Kristin Laidre a marine biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was part of the team of scientists who spent years tracking polar bears in Greenland.They recently published their surprising findings in a paper in Science.We lay out the evidence for a previously undocumented and highly isolated subpopulation of polar bears living on the southeast coast of Greenland.We knew you could find polar bears in that area, but we just didn’t think there were that many, because it’s not really a place, you'd expect a lot of bears or bears to be able to persist for very long.Basically―the area wasn’t expected to be particularly bear-friendly because it goes long periods of time without sea ice.
