Wildlife

Displaced Polar Bears - Russia

A visibly exhausted and starving polar bear wandered into a major Russian industrial city on Tuesday, hundreds of kilometres away from its natural habitat, as widespread wildfires rage across the Arctic Circle. The footage showed an emaciated polar bear in Norilsk, an industrial city in Siberia, located above the Arctic Circle. It is the first polar bear seen in the city in more than 40 years, according to local environmentalists.

Polar bears have increasingly been spotted far away from their natural sea-ice habitats as climate change pushes them further afield for food.

A polar bear was flown back to the northern arctic region of Chukotka in April by Russian authorities after it was found in a village around 700km away. Two months earlier, a Russian archipelago asked for help to tackle "a mass invasion of polar bears into inhabited areas."

Dolphin Deaths

More than 260 dolphins have become stranded since February on Gulf of Mexico beaches from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle.

The U.S. environment agency NOAA declared the marine mammal deaths an “unusual mortality event.” The agency says it is unclear what has caused the deaths, which are three times greater in number than average.

Some experts believe the deaths could be from the lingering effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Others think they are from changes in salinity due to river runoff, amplified by massive flooding upstream across the Midwest.