A photo of an emaciated polar bear is stirring a debate about the consequences of climate change.

Photographer Kerstin Langenberger of Arctic Dreams photography shared a photo on her Facebook page last month of a severely thin polar bear with protruding bones, taken in the Arctic Ocean's Svalbard region. Langenberger noted how she has noticed the summers getting warmer, the ice melting and more bears spending time on land.

"I realized that the fat bears are nearly exclusively males which stay on the pack ice all year long," she wrote. "The females, on the other hand, which den on land to give birth to their young, are often slim. With the pack ice retreating further and further north every year, they tend to be stuck on land where there's not much food."

"Only [a] few times I have seen beautifully fat mothers with beautifully fat young," she added. "Many times I have seen horribly thin bears, and those were exclusively females -- like this one here. A mere skeleton, hurt on her front leg, possibly by a desperate attempt to hunt a walrus while she was stuck on land."