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Transcript/Script((PLAYBOOK SLUG: Climate Change - Polar Bears
HEADLINE: Melting Arctic Sea Ice Threatens Polar Bears
TEASER: Loss of habitat drives polar bears closer to humans
PUBLISHED AT: 11/16/2023 at 10:30am
BYLINE: Natasha Mozgovaya
CONTRIBUTOR:
DATELINE: Kaktovik, Alaska
VIDEOGRAPHER: Natasha Mozgovaya
VIDEO EDITOR:
ASSIGNING EDITOR: Stearns
SCRIPT EDITORS: Stearns, Holly Franko
VIDEO SOURCE (S): VOA
PLATFORMS (mark with X): WEB __ TV _X_ RADIO __
TRT: 2:56
VID APPROVED BY: MAS
TYPE: TVR
EDITOR NOTES: There will be a separate web version of this story. Natasha says she added some bear photos in Pangea for the web story and emailed the Web desk about that.))
((INTRO:))
[[In the Arctic, the effects of climate change are happening on an accelerated scale, with temperatures rising two to four times faster than the global average. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya reports from Alaska about what is happening with melting sea ice pushing polar bears on to shore, closer to humans.]]
((NARRATOR))
((NARRATOR))
It’s a windy fall afternoon in Kaktovik, an Inupiat village with a population of less than 300 on Alaska’s North Slope. Flocks of snow geese land on Barter Island to feed on cotton grass before migrating south.
((Mandatory courtesy: U.S. Geological Survey))
And some hungry visitors show up for hunters’ whale scraps.
((NARRATOR))
Robert Thompson - an Inupiat hunter and wildlife guide – says there have been dramatic changes over the past 50 years.
((Robert Thompson, Inupiat Wildlife Guide))
“When I first went to Kaktovik, the ice was visible all summer. Pack ice, meaning ice that set doesn't melt. And so recently we had 700 miles [1,127 kilometers] of open water toward the North Pole. So that's affecting the polar bears.”
((NARRATOR))
((Mandatory courtesy: U.S. Geological Survey))
Todd Atwood is a polar bear researcher with the United States Geological Survey.
((Todd Atwood, USGS Research Wildlife Biologist))
“An optimal habitat for polar bears now is basically absent. It's disappeared. That tends to be the trigger for bears to either stay with the sea ice as it retreats further over those deeper waters, or, for a growing proportion of the population to make the swim to shore.”
((NARRATOR))
((Mandatory courtesy: U.S. Geological Survey))
Scientists have recorded polar bears swimming as far as 350 kilometers over several days. Even strong swimmers may not survive the challenge, says Thompson.
((Robert Thompson, Inupiat Wildlife Guide))
“With the ice around us melting, they are trying to swim ashore. The cubs don't make it.”
((NARRATOR))
((Mandatory courtesy: U.S. Geological Survey))
Less ice makes it harder for polar bears to hunt seals, according to Atwood.
((Todd Atwood, USGS Research Wildlife Biologist)) ((via Teams from Anchorage))
“It's changing their feeding behavior. And one of the things that we do see around communities, local coastal communities, is bears aggregating in sometimes fairly large numbers, several dozen bears to feed on subsistence remains of bowhead whale carcasses.”
((NARRATOR))
Posters in Kaktovik warn people to be on the lookout for polar bears.
((Mandatory courtesy: U.S. Geological Survey))
This time of year, the local bear patrol gets hundreds of calls about bears around houses.
((Todd Atwood, USGS Research Wildlife Biologist)) ((via Teams from Anchorage))
“One of the concerns that we have with bears coming ashore is that they're coming ashore in areas where people are active, whether it’s near communities, whether people are engaged in subsistence activities or whether it’s in the oil and gas industrial footprint where people are working on a daily basis. And that raises the likelihood of human-bear interactions and conflict.”
((COURTESY: U.S. Geological Survey))
((NARRATOR))
Research led by USGS scientists shows that in the first decade of the 21st century, the number of polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea dropped 40%.
[[FOR RADIO: Again, Todd Atwood.]]
((Todd Atwood, USGS Research Wildlife Biologist)) ((via Teams from Anchorage))
“One of the things that we're pretty confident of as a polar bear research community is that without sea ice, you're not going to have polar bears. They represent a kind of the ‘canary in the cryosphere’ in the sense that they are the animal that is probably most associated with the threat of climate change to wildlife persistence.”
((NARRATOR))
((COURTESY: U.S. Geological Survey))
The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the polar bear as a vulnerable species most threatened by the loss of sea ice. With an estimated 26,000 bears remaining worldwide, the group says all but a few of those bears could be lost by the end of the century without action on climate change.
((Natasha Mozgovaya, VOA News, Kaktovik, Alaska))
NewsML Media TopicsArts, Culture, Entertainment and Media
NetworkVOA
Embargo DateNovember 16, 2023 10:14 EST
BylineNatasha Mozgovaya
Brand / Language ServiceVoice of America - English, US Agency for Global Media
