In recent years, polar bears in the Beaufort Sea have had to travel far outside of their traditional arctic hunting grounds which has contributed to an almost 30% decrease in their population.

It's not the first time snow geese have died in large numbers in western Nunavut. The cause of this event is under investigation, but overpopulation could have played a role, says the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Dumps are often chock-full of plastic and, as a new survey shows, polar bears are ingesting a lot of it. In an analysis of the stomach contents of 51 polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea, researchers led by Raphaela Stimmelmayr, a wildlife veterinarian with Alaska’s North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, found that 25 percent of the bears had plastic in their stomachs.

Polar bears have been rummaging through science camps at the top of Greenland's ice sheet far inland, where they were never expected, and Polar bears are coming into communities more often these days, says Kristin Laidre, a marine biologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, and an authority on polar bear populations in Greenland. “It’s happening all over the Arctic, and it’s something that’s only going to be an increasing problem as we continue to lose sea ice,” she says.

The habitat overlap of polar bears and their main prey, ringed seals, is disappearing and the bears are instead getting closer to nesting birds.