Iceland warned of polar bear attacks?

Question

Iceland warned of polar bear attacks

Jun 24 2008

MARAUDING polar bears could cause terror on Iceland after experts claimed global warming could bring the killer beasts across the sea.

The alert came as police there shot two bears in just two weeks.

The animals - which are not native to Iceland - are thought to have floated across the Arctic Ocean on ice platforms which broke free from Greenland.

Climate expert Thor Jakobsson said: "Since two have reached the shore, more could be on the way."

may I have your comments please.

Answer 1

The main false statement I'd like to point out is that this has never happened in the past.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbey...  :

"Icelandic annals contain fairly frequent reports of polar bears which had been transported to Iceland by polar ice. As might be expected, they were more frequent visitors in past centuries when the ice was more extensive. All the same, they were a rare enough sight to cause a flurry of excitement when word spread of a polar bear in the vicinity. People closed themselves securely in their dwellings while the most daring men joined up to take on the uninvited guest.

There are stories, for example, of the shooting of a polar bear in 1792 in the West Fjords and another in North Iceland. In 1802 two bears came ashore in the Strandir district of the West Fjords. After spending several days visiting fish-storage shacks, one of the bears was killed. Nothing more was heard of the other. In 1874, a number of polar bears came to Iceland; three were killed in the Hornstrandir region of the West Fjords while three came ashore in Mjóifjörður in the East Fjords. Bears have not been known in Iceland since the year 1988, although in 1993 fishermen noticed a polar bear swimming several miles offshore."

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandrevi...

"Polar bears have visited Iceland every now and then by drifting ice. The oldest record of polar bears in Iceland is from 890, 16 years after settlement, when a farmer in Vatnsdalur spotted a she-bear with two cubs. The last visit was in 1993 when sailors saw a bear swimming off the coast of Strandir. It too was killed.

Polar bears were frequently tamed during the middle ages, but since then, no bear has been captured alive in Iceland. Polar bear skins were very valuable until the polar bears were preserved and the Danish crown was a sole owner of all polar bear skins taken in Iceland until 1900."

I'm ashamed that the police shot them though and didn't use tranqulizer darts and transport them back to Greenland.

Answer 2

Mr Jacobsson may be an expert on global warming, I just wonder if he has any notion about oceans. Please look at a map and see the distance between Groenland and Iceland. The closest in the West-East axis is about 700 miles. Even if the icefloe with our bear friends was floating in the right direction (The Gulf stream does not reach that high northerly latitude) at say 3 knots an hour, it would take 10 to 11 days to reach Iceland. At that latitude and without protection from the terrible North Atlantic climate I deem it very improbable that the bears would have made it. And that is supposing that they had taken their lunchboxes with fish and seals with them.

Answer 3

Excellent story.  Perfect example of why environmentalists should stop trying to protect vicious predators.

Answer 4

we've ruined the planet extremely now time for it to fight back,it's just a circle that the Mother Nature has been driving all along.the bear attack thing is just the beginning.

Answer 5

It doesn't take a PhD in logic to figure out that the decreased arctic ice will drive the polar bears toward civilization in search of food.

As for the uninformed who think we'll simply shoot the polar bears and everything will be OK, they obviously don't understand the balance between species.  As bear populations decrease, seal populations will increase. Seals eat fish and without one of their natural predators, they'll eat more fish. The human harvesting of fish from the ocean is already falling on hard times. Do we really need one of our competitors for food to increase in population?

Answer 6

Polar bears endangering humans....must be global warming!!  Wait...that's not right, is it?  I thought global warming was supposed to wipe out polar bears, not increase their range!

Answer 7

Global warming alarmists are very imaginative.  They can never predict anything before it happens, but afterwards - anything can be attributed to global warming.

Actually ice breaking up has more to do with the change of seasons than a 0.4 degree warming which occured between 1970 and 1998.

Answer 8

What kind of comments are you looking for? That's something that's happened. Even those who deny the reality of global warming can't deny the fact that the ice platforms are breaking up, and migration of species to different areas is what happens when climates change.

Answer 9

Dr House

"At that latitude and without protection from the terrible North Atlantic climate I deem it very improbable that the bears would have made it."

At this time of year a bear could simple walk across as there is still an ice bridge stretching from Greenland to the northern coast of Iceland and as for terrible Atlantic climate, it is their home they live on the icepack looking for food, and while unusual they have been sighted in Iceland in the past.

Answer 10

'Marauding' is hardly the word to use when polar bears go on vacation.  They're often out on sea cruises, and since ice floes are free, why not?

Seriously, polar bears in Iceland are nothing new.  Depending on the ice shelves and how they calve from year to year, it's quite possible that they floated across.  But polar bears differ from other bears in that they are really more marine animals than land animals.  They don't get cold, can't sink or drown other than in big storms, and it's not unusual to see them swimming hundreds of miles from the nearest shore.  They are great swimmers and divers.  The fact that there are so many of them now indicates that it shouldn't be unusual to see them in areas other than the Arctic, Alaska, and Norway which are their natural habitats.  They have been seen as far south as the Gulf of St. Lawrence on occassion.

Maybe more are on the way, maybe not.  With polar bears you can't fool around...that I know.  They are the largest carnivores on earth.  Shooting them was the best solution.

Answer 11

This is nature attacking humans we are at war with nature and it will get worse... think about it.

I hope people understand what we are causing soon enough.