Blowing the Whistle

The Great Whales, the Fate of the Arctic Ocean and Us

Almost twenty-five years ago, I well remember hunkering down alongside marine scientist Wayne Perryman against a fierce wind in an elbow of a rocky promontory. Huge waves sent a jet spray of seawater that fell just short of drenching us. We were looking for gray whales in central California, at the beginning of their 5,000-mile journey to their Arctic feeding grounds.

I was soon to publish Eye of the Whale, my account of falling in love with these amazing animals and following their migration. On this day, biologist Perryman expressed alarm at their dwindling numbers. Something had gone very wrong with the population of tiny amphipods that provide the gray whales’ primary sustenance in the Bering Sea. According to a 1999 scientific report, this was attributable to “the depressing effect of increasing water temperature over the last decade on amphipod biomass.”

Depressing is a double entendre. I quoted from another report in my 2001 book: “Scientists studying global warming believe Arctic ecosystems and their wildlife will be far more vulnerable to climate changes than those at the lower latitudes.” Sea-ice thickness had already declined by over 40 percent since 1958, and it was estimated that the Arctic’s year-round ice pack could completely disappear within another fifty years. As the renowned biologist E.O. Wilson put it: “All the species of the high latitudes, reindeer moss to polar bears, risk extinction.” The Arctic was, and is, the world’s fastest changing ocean.

This fall, my family binged on a remarkable five-part Netflix docuseries, Our Oceans, narrated and co-executive produced by Barack Obama. Each episode focuses on a different body of water, moving around the world with the current and traversing 75,000 miles. The photography is the best I’ve ever seen in any nature documentary, and I urge everyone to watch it. You’ll see footage for the first time of unicorn-like narwhals using 10-foot-long tusks to stun their fishing prey. You’ll also see something heartbreakingly real - a mother polar bear struggling to teach her two cubs how to navigate the thinly precarious ice floes. One of the babies is clearly weaker than the other, and so is likely to join the nearly half of all polar bear cubs that in 2024 didn’t make it to their first birthdays.

Then this week, on December 10, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its annual Arctic report card. A frightening milestone has been reached. After each of the last nine years recorded the Arctic’s highest average temperatures since 1900, the tundra has gone from being a carbon-storing sink for millennia to becoming a source of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

That’s because the permafrost soil, which used to stay frozen year-round, is thawing and releasing decomposed ancient plant matter as methane and carbon dioxide. At the same time, record-breaking wildfires blazing across the tundra have further melted the permafrost while scorching the new greenery that had taken root - and which would otherwise have helped ameliorate the warming trend by sucking up carbon.

What’s transpiring has many synergistic impacts. Rain used to be rare in the Arctic, but in 2022 a thunderstorm lasting almost an hour occurred in Siberia, after three storms passed through an area of Alaska that almost never sees such events. As more rain falls instead of snow, the resulting ice layers on the ground prevent the caribou from grazing; their populations have declined by around 65 percent. The precipitation also triggers more flooding, landslides and avalanches, as well as diminished water equality.

According to Brendan Rogers, an associate scientist at Massachusetts’ Woodwell Climate Research Center, “these issues are not just staying in the Arctic - they’re impacting all of us.” He points out that “the permafrost region contains about twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere now and about three times as much carbon as in the aboveground biomass of all the world’s forest.” That’s a heckuva lot of carbon at stake, in terms of prospective future emissions.

So, in its final days, what is the Biden administration thinking by just approving plans for a sale of oil and gas leases in Alaska? This is to transpire on January 9, leaving open the prospect of drilling in part of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Sure, it’s a lot smaller land area than the previous Trump administration put up for future bidding, and the Bureau of Land Management claims that any drilling won’t impact polar bear or caribou habitat. But this still sets a terrible precedent in terms of what the new and unfettered Trump team might do. The President-elect has already touted a 2017 law on Alaska drilling policy that enabled the Biden team’s decision. The hope is that ongoing litigation filed in 2020 against the lease sales by a contingent of environmental groups led by Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council will nip any further expansion in the bud.

What can we do in the meantime? For starters, show our kids and grandkids Our Oceans. Let them observe how six majestic 40-ton humpback whales position themselves to protect dozens of seals from ten killer whales preparing to attack. Perhaps we could take a lesson from our cetacean brethren.