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.

The Arctic’s like an air conditioner or refrigerator for the global climate...And as the Arctic warms, partly because the sea ice is going away, it’s like you’re opening that refrigerator door.

A dog-sled team ran into standing water after the onset of warm conditions across the northern territory caused rapid ice melt.

Sixty-one thousand reindeer starved to death in the northwestern reaches of the Russian tundra in November 2013 in the largest recorded mortality event of its kind.

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.