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Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
April 2009

Vol. 14, No. 17 Week of April 26, 2009

Changing Arctic challenges the whalers

Spring ice has become more dangerous for subsistence hunters, while storms and high winds can lead to rough seas in the fall

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

As the bowhead whales migrate north in the spring from the Bering Sea, through the Chukchi Sea and east across the Beaufort Sea to their summer feeding grounds, and then return south in the fall ahead of the expanding winter ice floes, the subsistence hunters of Alaska’s North Slope have for millennia hunted the whales in the spring and the fall, as the whales transit the region.

But climate change and, with it, changing ice and weather conditions, appears to be having an impact on that annual whale hunting ritual.

Spring ice

The spring sea ice near Barrow has become thinner than it used to be a few years ago and that has caused hunters from Barrow and other communities to become more dependent on hunting in the fall in some years, Harry Brower, chairman of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, told the National Marine Fisheries Service Arctic Stakeholder Open-water Workshop on April 6.

In the past thick, solid spring ice enabled whale hunting in the ice leads, but now the sea ice tends to be thinner and the shore-fast ice less stable than they used to be.

“Spring whaling is becoming more difficult for everyone,” Brower said. “… We’ve had close calls about people falling through the ice. … It’s a very dangerous situation.”

But severe storms in the fall are making the sea increasingly rough and causing broken ice to be present in the offshore waters. And more open water is resulting in heavy swells in the Beaufort Sea to the east of Barrow, causing the Barrow whalers to seek more sheltered water on the west side of Point Barrow, the long, narrow spit that juts into the sea at the northwest end of the North Slope.

Fall hunt

North Slope Borough wildlife biologist Robert Suydam told the workshop that although Chukchi Sea villagers are finding it increasingly difficult to hunt for whales in the spring, historical records suggest that a rise in the bowhead whale population may present more whaling opportunities in the Chukchi Sea in the fall. Suydam came to this conclusion from an analysis of the logs of the Yankee whalers that operated in the 1800s and early 1900s, a time when the bowhead population was likely higher than it is now.

“As the current population continues to grow it seems very likely that the bowheads will again start to be occupying these same areas in the same numbers that they used to 100 years ago,” Suydam said.

Appear later

George Noongwook, vice chairman of the AEWC, a resident of Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea, on the bowhead whale migration route nearly 700 miles to the southwest of Barrow, told the workshop about changes in the timing of bowhead hunting by St. Lawrence Island whalers over the past decade.

The whalers used to land bowheads in April. Then, around 1990, the whales started appearing in November. Now much of the bowhead whale hunt occurs in November, December or even January, Noongwook said.

And weather conditions appear to be becoming more extreme in the northern Bering Sea, with Savoonga now experiencing winds of well over 100 miles per hour in February, he said.

Brower questioned whether oil industry wildlife monitoring plans are taking into account the changing pattern of subsistence hunting. He also cautioned that companies operating offshore need to be prepared to deal with the impacts of increasingly strong storms in Arctic waters. l






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