Quote Originally Posted by Hagbard Celine View Post
Seriously though, why don't they just swim back?
The bears are being forced to swim for miles at a stretch. They think that the retreating ice floes are near land but they aren't and the bears get tired and drown during the journey.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGH6H58GK1.DTL

The sea ice is breaking up earlier in the spring, and the ocean is freezing over later in the fall. With the thinning and cracking of the pack ice, the polar bears are forced to come to land and search for food, which they are usually unable to find.

Fish and Wildlife scientists from Anchorage have found that more bears in the Beaufort Sea have come ashore in September as the distance between sea ice and land has increased, based on the first five years of an ongoing study. In earlier Canadian studies on the polar bear population in the Hudson Bay, where sea ice is shrinking the fastest, bears weighed less and had fewer births, and their young had a lower survival rate.

Scientists from the federal Minerals Management Service concluded that some bears were drowning in the long swim from ice to land. They saw four drowned bears floating in open water in 2004, apparently exhausted while trying to swim 125 to 185 miles between ice and land in high winds.


The bears are starting to feel the heat.