Disappearing Sea Ice Forcing Thousands of Walruses Onto Beaches
Read Time:1 Minute, 23 Second
(Newser) What a loss of sea ice looks like: an estimated 35,000 walruses, crowded on one stretch of Alaskan beach. Images taken on Saturday via plane as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual marine animal survey capture just that. The enormous grouping of the mammals near the Inupiat Eskimo village of Point Lay, about 700 miles northwest of Anchorage, is the result of disappearing sea ice, explains a walrus expert with the US Geological Survey.
The area’s summer sea ice vanished by mid-September, leaving the walruses with nowhere in the Chukchi Sea to rest between their dives to the seafloor for food, Chadwick Jay tells the Alaska Dispatch News. He says that six of the last eight years have seen this occur.
The walruses met trouble on land: US Fish and Wildlife Service observers last week spotted an estimated 50 carcasses on the beach; they suspect the animals may have been killed in a stampede, which can be triggered by a polar bear, human hunter, or low-flying airplane. A necropsy team will head to the area to investigate. And as far as food goes, biologists note that beach areas aren’t the best for feeding; the richest food sources are found offshore along the continental shelf. The World Wildlife Fund had this to say to the AP: “The walruses are telling us what the polar bears have told us and what many indigenous people have told us in the high Arctic, and that is that the Arctic environment is changing extremely rapidly and it is time for the rest of the world to take notice and also to take action.”
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Two words: fecal matter.
The impacts of climate change are unimaginable. A few years ago, we thought of rising ocean levels. But that is the least of our worries. While it’s true that many low coastal/island nations are threatened by coastal flooding, even they are discovering that a more insidious danger is the infiltration of salty seawater into previously fresh water coastal ponds, aquifers, and…importantly…the water supply that sustains coastal vegetation.
Only those who have studied and considered the cascade of impacts have a real grasp of what may be coming. And even they don’t really know…they can only speculate. Meanwhile the climate change deniers seize the uncertainty as an excuse to conduct business as usual.
I hadn’t read that Jim, and that’s disturbing indeed. I worry for my grandchildren because I believe that in the years to come things are going to get very, very bad.