Polar Bears Are Becoming Smaller Because of Global Warming

Global warming is starting to have a big impact on some of the world’s animals.Scientists have found out that polar bears are becoming smaller because they do not get enough to eat.

A polar bear weighs only two thirds of what it used to weigh 30 years ago. It is harder for them to hunt their main source of food – seals. In open water polar bears can not catch them. They wait on the ice for them to come up for air, and then they snatch them. As the ice sheets in the Arctic are melting away bears cannot get to their food so easily.

Other scientists say that instead of hunting seals, polar bears are now hunting each other in order to survive. Two years ago an American government study predicted that global warming would kill two thirds of the world’s polar bears by 2050. But if the melting of the ice sheets goes on at the current speed the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free in the next 20 years.

Polar Bear on Arctic Ice Sheet

Words

• current = at present, now
• global warming = the rise in the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere because of greenhouse gases
• ice sheet = an area of thick ice that covers the Arctic and Antarctic
• impact = effect
• predict = forecast, to say what will happen in the future
• scientist = a person who works in science
• seal = a large sea animal that eats fish and lives around the coast
• snatch = catch
• source = supply
• speed = how fast something is
• study = a piece of work that wants to find out more about a subject o topic
• survive = to continue living
• used to = something that happened in the past
• weigh = how heavy something is