Green/earthawareness
When it comes to protecting your home, adt home security is the expert. But when it comes to protecting the environment, we are all responsible. With global warming, the effects of warming temperatures on animals and their habitats in polar regions, including parts of Alaska. Polar bears, seals, migratory birds, caribou and reindeer are all experiencing changes that could have dramatic effects on their species and the ecosystems they inhabit
The sea ice of the Arctic Ocean and the connected frozen seas is home to the largest and most predatory of the bear family. All bears alive today evolved 22 million years ago from a common ancestor — the Ursavus of Asia. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) evolved from a group of brown bears (Ursus arctos) over 200,000 years ago, which became isolated from other brown bear populations by glaciers, possibly in Siberia. It is easy to imagine the evolutionary change in brown bears that inhabited a northern coast during a climatic cooling period, when food as tempting as unwary seal pups can be found offshore.
For example, polar bears are dependent on sea ice to hunt seals and to move from one area to another. Polar bears are unlikely to survive as a species if there is an almost complete loss of summer sea-ice cover, which is projected to occur before the end of this century by some climate models. The seals that polar bears hunt are also unlikely to be able to adapt to an absence of summer sea ice, because they give birth to and nurse their pups on the ice and use it as a place for resting.
Caribou and reindeer populations could decline because of their dependence on tundra for vegetation. As tundra vegetation zones continue to move northward with the changing climate, the caribou and reindeer could have a more difficult time finding food and raising their calves.
Climate change could have both positive and negative impacts on invertebrates and insects. Recent warming in Alaska, for example, has caused spruce budworms to reproduce further north. Spruce budworms are the most widely found and most destructive pests to coniferous (evergreen) trees in the western United States. The Kenai Peninsula in south-central Alaska experienced a massive outbreak of spruce bark beetles (another serious insect pest) in the 1990s, causing 10-20 percent mortality of trees
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