A new study into the vanished populations suggest that not all cold-loving animals can simply retreat north in the face of global warming, the arctic fox stands in danger of getting extinct.
Scientists who investigated the fate of European arctic foxes  during the end of the last ice age say the animals most likely died out after becoming isolated by rapidly rising temperatures.
Since arctic foxes are highly fast moving animals, the findings don't bode well for other, slower creatures that are sensitive to climate warming. The zoologist Love Dalén of Stockholm University said "What our results show is that Arctic species don't retreat, they just disappear,"

A team headed by Dalén and Anders Götherström of Uppsala University compared the DNA of arctic foxes in Scandinavia to genetic samples from animals that lived to the south some 20,000 years ago, when the previous ice age was drawing to a close.
the study team said, “If the prehistoric foxes had retreated north as temperatures rose, their DNA should be reflected in current populations in northern Scandinavia.”
But the genetic analysis of fossil bones unearthed in Germany, Belgium, and western Russia indicate that there is no ancestral link to arctic foxes living today.