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52 Polar Bears 'Invade' a Russian Town to Eat Garbage Instead of Starve to Death      

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | February 11, 2019 04:11pm ET 0 0

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Polar bears ransack a garbage dump for food near Churchill, Manitoba. On Feb. 9, a small village in Russia declared a state of emergency after being visited by at least 52 hungry polar bears in the last two months. Credit: Shutterstock

Fifty-two hungry polar bears have occupied Guba, a work settlement in a remote Russian Arctic archipelago. The animals reportedly attacked locals, ransacked garbage dumps and barged into residential buildings, according to a government statement translated from Russian and released this weekend. The massive invasion of polar bears prompted regional officials to declare a state of emergency on Saturday (Feb. 9).

"People are scared, afraid to leave the house … afraid to let their children go to school," Zhigansha Musin, a local school administrator, said in the statement. "Constantly in the village are from six to 10 polar bears." Advertisement Belushya Guba is a settlement of about 2,000 people in Russia's remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago, which is best known for its spooky plankton blooms and apocalyptic nuclear bomb tests. It's not uncommon to see polar bears near the area's southern coasts, where they regularly converge in winter for seasonal seal hunts, according to Russia's state-run news site TASS. [The Frozen North: Stunning Images of Russia from Above] However, thinning sea ice caused by global warming likely drove the bears inland in search of more readily available meals, researchers from Moscow's A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, a branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told TASS. The allure of edible waste in Belushya Guba's garbage bins and dump sites likely stopped the bears from migrating farther north, the researchers said.

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PeterMurtagh ✔@PeterMurtagh

What man is doing to the planet: polar bears on a rubbish dump in Novaya Zemlya, Siberia. How dispiriting.

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