Melting Planet

Species are dying out faster than we have dared recognise, scientists will warn this week. The erosion of polar ice is the first break in a fragile chain of life extending across the planet, from bears in the north to penguins in the far south.

The polar bear is one of the natural world's most famous predators - the king of the Arctic wastelands. But, like its vast Arctic home, the polar bear is under unprecedented threat. Both are disappearing with alarming speed.
Thinning ice and longer summers are destroying the bears' habitat, and as the ice floes shrink, the desperate animals are driven by starvation into human settlements - to be shot. Stranded polar bears are drowning in large numbers as they try to swim hundreds of miles to find increasingly scarce ice floes. Local hunters find their corpses floating on seas once coated in a thick skin of ice.


By Andrew Buncombe in Anchorage and Severin Carrell in London
The Independent Online Edition