In a report this week, a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists warned that hungry polar bears are increasingly turning to garbage dumps to fill their stomachs as their icy habitat disappears due to climate change.

Seven polar bears, including a wounded mother bear with two cubs, were scared away by rescuers after they got dangerously close to reindeer herders at several locations on the Yamal peninsula. There are concern over rising numbers of the Arctic’s largest predators leaving their natural habitat and coming closer to humans.

It is the first polar bear seen in the city in more than 40 years, according to local environmentalists.

"We've all known with climate change, the bears are coming ashore earlier, they're spending more time onshore, and they're becoming habituated," said Rockwell, a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History.

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.

Thinning sea ice has driven more than 50 polar bears ashore on an Arctic archipelago in northern Russia, causing chaos for the local population.

With sea ice reduced, polar bears in the Arctic are spending more time on land, leading to increased attacks on people. Concerned Inuit communities want to increase hunting quotas, but researchers are testing new technologies they hope will reduce these often deadly confrontations.

In September 2021, photographer Dmitry Kokh visited Kolyuchin Island and found the strange sight of polar bears that had taken over an abandoned settlement.