On Svalbard, a group of islands 350 miles (560km) north of the Norwegian mainland, and the starting point for many polar explorers, the bears are showing signs of becoming island dwellers instead of living on the ice sheets.

As the Arctic sea ice contracts, retreating farther each summer and returning thinner and less extensively each winter, the bears have to choose between remaining on Svalbard or swimming after the ice. Recent observations by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) suggest that they increasingly prefer the former.

By staying on Svalbard, the bears are choosing to survive on little food, but are expending less energy hunting for seal pups hidden in the shrinking Arctic ice, a task made harder by competition between bears for the limited food source.

Jan-Gunnar Winther, director of the NPI, said: “The sea ice has retreated farther each summer over the past five years and there have been observations of bears that prefer to stay on the islands or have been left behind.

“By staying on the islands the bear will find enough eggs and dead birds, mainly fledgelings that don’t make their first flight safely from precipices. There have also been observations that polar bears have killed reindeer, though we can’t be certain they didn’t do that a century ago.”

Professor Winther made his comments during a week-long tour of Svalbard by scientists and government officials from across Europe. The Times was the only British newspaper to accompany the group on board the research ship MV Lance.

Polar bears in Greenland have already been shown to have turned to living off the land rather than sea ice and those in Svalbard seem to be following suit. About 3,000 bears live in Svalbard and their number is thought to have risen slightly since hunting them was banned in the 1970s.

The recent changes on Svalbard are immediately visible. In what should be an icy wasteland, fjords remain unfrozen, glaciers are melting and pack ice that once made the northern coastline impassable to ships has disappeared.

At Ross Island, the pack ice that should be present for miles around has already vanished over the horizon this month, to be replaced by blue seas and fewer than a dozen icebergs melting in the midnight sun.

The island is at a latitude of almost 81° and is the most northerly part of Svalbard.

Gunnar Sand, who led the group of scientists and officials, said: “I’ve only ever seen as little sea ice as this here once. And that was in the month of September. I’ve never known it like this in June. Everybody I’ve talked to says it’s highly unusual. The summer melting of the ice keeps going through June and July and in August there should still be some sea ice here. It should be packed with ice floes.”

The ice has loosened its grip on the land to such an extent that it now lies more than a hundred miles farther north than expected for this time of year. Although climate change modelling predicts a retreat over the next century, the speed at which the pack ice has melted has taken observers by surprise. Polar scientists are anxious to discover whether this year’s rapid retreat of the ice near Svalbard is a result of climate change or if it is simply a one-off fluctuation.

The main reason for the retreat is the temperature of the water to a depth of more than 3,000ft (900m), which has heated by 1C in recent years. Melt rates have been accelerated by the exceptionally mild winter experienced in Svalbard this year, with temperatures 12.7C (23F) above the average for the past three decades.

Anne Kjersti Fahlvik, director of the Research Council of Norway, told scientists and officials on board the MV Lance that international research into polar shrinkage needed to be accelerated. “We have learnt the temperatures have been changing. We have to find out where this is a fluctuation and where it is a trend,” she said.

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