Population assessments have revealed that polar bears in Greenland are suffering from crippling wounds on their paws due to wet snow that gets stuck to the pads and freezes into blocks.

This slush is then refreezing at spiky angles, causing lacerations for the mammals who are used to stepping on the relatively soft snow. Polar bears already have to contend with longer Arctic ...

precipitation is increasingly falling as rain instead of snow, and one scenario they envisage is rainfall causing a slushy surface on the ice, which then freezes on the paws of polar bears that ...

Three adult polar bears travel across sea ice in eastern Greenland. Environments in the Far North that would have stayed well below freezing now experience freeze-thaw cycles and wet snow due to a ...

22 in the journal Ecology. The debilitating ice balls likely formed due to slushy snow sticking between bumps on the pads ...

"As strange as it sounds, with climate warming there are more frequent freeze-thaw cycles with more wet snow, and this leads to ice buildup on polar bears' paws." Between 2012 and 2022, Laidre and ...

"As strange as it sounds, with climate warming there are more frequent freeze-thaw cycles with more wet snow, and this leads to ice buildup on polar bears' paws." Between 2012 and 2022, Laidre and ...

Winter warming and rain-on-snow events have also been increasing as a result, the authors write. Continued warming will likely create “challenging surface conditions for polar bears to travel on ...