Climate Change
Two polar bear cubs are spotted playing with plastic sheets on a remote island
These unsettling pictures show two adorable polar bear cubs playing with a large sheet of plastic on a remote Arctic island.
The siblings were spotted with their mother on the icy coast of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago about halfway between the mainland and North Pole.
The black plastic stands out against the seemingly spotless landscape as the youngsters paw at it, before putting it in their mouths.
Svalbard is hundreds of miles from continental Europe and has a population of about 2,500, yet researchers navigating the freezing waters found plastic waste wherever they went.
The pristine waters of the Arctic are turning into a floating rubbish dump – posing a threat to marine life, scientists warn.
One of the densest areas of plastic rubbish anywhere in the world’s seas has been discovered north of Norway and Russia.
Miles from civilisation, the amount of plastic waste in the Barents Sea – on the margins of the Arctic Ocean – has risen almost 20-fold in just ten years.
Fri 13 Jul 2018 at 09:44
