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Vanity Fair outdid itself in the Madonna Issue, May 2008. Not only is the case of White House war crimes covered, and the story on Monsanto and another one about China working to control the weather, but this, about the Polar Bears trying to adapt, and failing, to the de Polarization of their homes.
For years, the warning signs had been piling up. Polar bears are Arctic creatures, spending most of their year on ice off the northern coasts of Canada and the U.S., Greenland, Scandinavia, and Russia. As temperatures in the Arctic warmed at three times the global average, evidence mounted that the ice was receding. The bears’ very habitat was melting away. The consequences were dramatic.
Of the world’s 19 distinct polar-bear populations (with an estimated total of 22,000), the one most carefully studied is in Canada’s western Hudson Bay. Instead of hunting from the ice in late spring and early summer, scooping up newly weaned ringed-seal pups like so many hors d’oeuvres, the bears found the Hudson Bay ice melting all too soon. Many lost significant body mass when forced to swim too early to shore and stay ashore too long. Females bore one cub instead of three. Some starving polar bears engaged in cannibalism. East of Kaktovik, U.S. scientists reported four polar bears drowned. Polar bears are among the world’s best marine-mammal swimmers. They aren’t supposed to drown. But even polar bears can’t swim indefinitely. For those four, the ice edge had receded too far.