In late March, United States Geological Survey (USGS) biologists conducting routine studies on 33 bears in the southern Beaufort Sea region near Barrow found that nine of them had fur loss — alopecia — or skin lesions on their skin, neck and ears (a photo posted on Alaska Public Radio Network shows a bear with the lesions). As Kieran Mulvaney writes on Discovery News, bears with such fur loss are not uncommon; what is unusual is to find so many bears with such. The bears appeared to be otherwise healthy.

USGS chief biologist Tony DeGange says that bears with such symptoms have been found since 1999. Scientists will be collecting blood and tissues from polar bears near the Canadian border and also in the Prudhoe Bay region in mid-May to try to figure out what is causing the symptoms.

One possible culprit is a “mysterious illness” affecting seals and walruses that left 60 seals dead and another 75 diseased last summer in an Unusual Mortality Event. Seals with the disease have sores, labored breathing and lethargy while walruses, though their skin and fur are affected, seem healthy. Notably, ringed seals, polar bears’ primary prey, are the most affected, though other types of seals (ribbon, bearded and spotted) also have the disease.

Alaska Public Radio Network says that polar bears are not being considered part of the Unusual Mortality Event. The bears are a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act; even if they were not, DeGange says that the USGS “would put a high priority on understanding what’s causing the symptoms” as they are an “iconic species in the arctic” and a “subsistence resource to the natives on the north slope.”

Let’s hope scientists can figure out what is causing polar bears to lose their fur soon and certainly before any bears succumb to the “mysterious illness” as the seals have.

Related Care2 Coverage

Could Zoos’ Breeding Idea Be A ‘Noah’s Ark’ For Polar Bears?

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Save Yupi: Polar Bear Suffering in Mexican Zoo

The world’s oceans are in trouble. Every day, 22 million tons of carbon dioxide from factories, cars, power plants and other human sources are absorbed by the world’s oceans.

The result? A frightening phenomenon that’s making seawater more acidic, spelling potential disaster for many marine animals, from plankton and coral up the food chain to sea stars, salmon, sea otters, whales — and ultimately people who rely on oceans for food.

The Center for Biological Diversity has launched a new national Endangered Oceans campaign to save our sea life from this unprecedented threat. The Center is calling on the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to produce a national action plan to tackle ocean acidification.

Sign their petition and help avert this disaster for our oceans and sea life.

Since the Industrial Revolution, oceans have become 30 percent more acidic because of the carbon pollution we’re pumping into the atmosphere. We’re already seeing the effects as coral reefs collapse, oyster beds disappear and tiny creatures that are important food sources get smaller and smaller.

Shell-forming species like corals, crabs, oysters and urchins are getting hit first because ocean acidification robs seawater of the compounds these creatures need to build shells and skeletons, impairing their development and, ultimately, their survival. If shellfish populations collapse, the animals that eat them will also suffer, with potentially devastating ripple effects throughout the ocean’s food web.

Two important planetary ecosystems, coral reefs and Antarctica’s Southern Ocean, are on the front lines of the acidification crisis.

Coral reefs critical to the protection of coastlines across tropical and subtropical parts of the world may disappear as the rate of erosion exceeds the rate at which corals can rebuild — with staggering repercussions for related ecosystems like mangrove and seagrass.

Meanwhile, in the Southern Ocean, marine snails could be eliminated. These Antarctic pteropods are an important staple in the diet of carnivorous zooplankton, North Pacific salmon, mackerel, herring, cod and baleen whales.

It’s clear that this crisis, left unchecked, could spin out of control with devastating effects on vast numbers of species, from small shell-building oysters and reef fish to crabs, whales and sea otters.

Like global warming, the acidification of our oceans is a problem that’s vast in scale and demands a rapid and ambitious response. Even though our oceans are absorbing roughly one ton of CO2 per person on Earth each year, almost nothing has been done to curb acidification.

The Center for Biological Diversity’s campaign to fight acidification is using the Clean Water Act to stop the pollution that’s causing it — greenhouse gas emissions — as well as to improve water-quality standards and pH monitoring.

We’re going to be part of the solution, and we need your help. Sign the petition to end the acidification of our oceans.

Learn more about the Endangered Oceans campaign, read an FAQ about ocean acidification and see profiles of affected wildlife and U.S. regions.

Related Stories:

Oceans on Acid: Oceans Worst in 300 Years

Oldest Living Thing on Earth Threatened by Climate Change

10 Marine Species on the Brink of Mass Extinction Due to Ocean Acidification

NOTE: This is a guest post from Victoria Marzilli, a New Media Specialist at Oxfam America.

Is food aid just a game to politicians in Washington? The way the US Food Aid system works now, you might think so. Only 0.05% of the Federal budget goes to food aid programs; in 2010, that aid helped save the lives of about 65 million people in 48 countries. Helping hungry people during food crises is essential not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it reduces instability around the world and protects the most vulnerable communities from catastrophe.

But the current US food aid system is broken and needs to be fixed. Of the money we spend on food aid, more than half (53 percent) is wasted because of special interest regulations — like buying food from preferred US growers and shipping overseas on preferred US vessels — instead of helping the people who need it most.

With last year’s drought and subsequent food crisis in West Africa, shouldn’t we make sure our food aid dollars are being used wisely to prevent crises like this from recurring? There is a way. If we buy food aid locally in developing countries, more money goes to actual food, local farmers earn income, and people need less aid for the long term. This also eliminates the expenses of buying from costly growers, and shipping overseas. If we reform costly US regulations, we can respond to crises up to 14 weeks faster — and for the same price, we can reach up to 17.1 million more people with lifesaving food aid.

Fixing the system seems like a no-brainer, but in order to make these changes happen, we as Americans need to make sure our legislators hear us loud and clear. We need to tell them to stop playing with other people’s food! And we have the opportunity to do that right now. The food aid regulations are a part of the US Farm Bill, which is up for debate in Congress this summer, so the time is now to make your voice heard.

Join Oxfam America in calling on Congress to cut the red tape in the Farm Bill and reform the food aid system. Watch this video, below, and share it with your friends. Then tell Congress to stop playing with other people’s food. We grow enough food on this planet to ensure everyone has enough to eat, but political obstacles, like unnecessary food aid regulations, get in the way.

Go to www.oxfamamerica.org/foodaid to take action.

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Oxfam America is an international relief and development organization that creates lasting solutions to poverty, hunger, and injustice. To join our efforts or learn more, go to www.oxfamamerica.org.

Care2 Earth Month: Back to Basics

This year, Care2 decided to expand Earth Day into Earth Month, since there is so much to explore when it comes to the environment. Every day in April, we’ll have a post about some of the most important topics for the environment, exploring and explaining the basics. It’s a great tool to help you get started with helping the environment or help explain it to others. See the whole series here.

In Northern Alaska, people don’t need to be convinced about climate change because they see it happening all around them and literally under them — the very ground is changing.

Each year, the sea ice gets thinner and arrives later. The lack of shore ice that used to protect them from storms is leading to some villages being moved inland. Fish species from warmer waters, new birds and new insects, like spruce bark beetles, which kill trees, are appearing.

Houses are built on stilts, to avoid melting the permafrost, a layer of frozen earth that begins about two feet beneath the surface and goes down, in North Alaska, some 2,000 feet. Some of those houses are collapsing. Roads which needed resurfacing once a decade because of melting permafrost are now being resurfaced every year. So-called ‘drunken forests‘ are appearing as trees start to keel over.

The ground is changing, melting and it could be a preview of our worst climate nightmare.

Globally, permafrost covers an area the area of the United States and Canada minus Texas. It holds an estimated 400 gigatons of methane, one of the greenhouse gases that is hastening the earth’s warming. As the permafrost thaws — which it has begun to do — lakes can drain away and the thawed soil can release billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere.

About half of the world’s underground organic carbon is found in northern permafrost regions. This is more than double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in the form of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.

Now scientists are using new satellite methods to track changes.

Although permafrost cannot be directly measured from space, factors such as surface temperature, land cover and snow parameters, soil moisture and terrain changes can be captured by satellites.

A February conference about the satellite measurements produced a number of animations showing disconcerting changes in freezing patterns and surface temperature over the arctic over several years.

· You can watch the animations here.

You can also watch another animation, which zooms in on the seasonal deformation of a track of land on Alaska’s North Slope during the summers of 2010 and 2011. Watch the red shift that signals the transformation of frozen ground into squishy muck — a meltdown that then subsides several centimeters as summer turns to fall.

The thaw which the satellites are detecting is already evident on the ground. In an article for the Smithsonian Magazine, Bob Reiss met Inuit Milton Noongwook. He is shown a series of large wooden boxes set deep into permafrost to store frozen walrus meat — winter food. Noongwook pulled aside a door and in the dark below Reiss sees hunks of meat amid a sheen of frost. But it was also wet down there. “It’s melting,” Milton said. “It never used to do that. If it gets too warm, the food will spoil.”

Greenhouse gases from permafrost have only been measured as a factor in global warming in the last few years. Currently, the estimate is that they will contribute to making warming happen up to a third faster. But this is only, as one scientist calls it, “a seat-of-the-pants expert assessment.”

Since 1970, the Arctic has warmed at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the globe, due to polar amplification. There is some evidence that the speed of temperature increases there is causing rapid change in the permafrost. A 2010 study found methane emissions rising by a third in just five years.

The good news? According to recent modeling work, if global emissions are cut rapidly and deeply enough to meet the world’s stated target of limiting the average global temperature rise to 2C above pre-industrial levels, the majority of the world’s permafrost will remain frozen.

Related Stories:

6 Ways To Combat Climate Change and Extreme Weather

Scientists Warn Climate Change May Be Irreversible

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