The Dazzling Complexity of the Frozen World - 3 Quarks Daily

The Dazzling Complexity of the Frozen World - 3 Quarks Daily

Jaime Herndon at Undark: It’s an iconic image: A polar bear perched on a lone ice cap, drifting at sea. Is that the fate climate change has in store for this powerful Arctic inhabitant? In 2004, the discovery of a fossil polar bear jaw on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, suggested another possibility. The fossil came from a bear that had lived between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, an era that was warm — even warmer than today. But studies of …