Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Flying about 460 meters above the seas off Alaska in 2004 on the hunt for bowhead whales, federal wildlife biologist Charles Monnett and colleagues spotted four white blobs floating in the water. The white blobs were polar bears , which drowned in the open ocean following a powerful Arctic storm. Two years later, Monnett and his colleague Jeffrey Gleason published a note about the drowned polar bears in the peer-reviewed journal Polar Biology , speculating that the ongoing retreat of sea ice in the Arctic forced these polar bears to swim longer distances and potentially left them too exhausted to survive the storm. [More] Read More ...
