News

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aerial Surveys of Arctic Marine Mammals (ASAMM) program has photographed some 35,000 walruses in a massive haulout at Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo village 700 miles northwest of Anchorage. The animals were initially spotted on September 13, with some of the biggest groups captured on September 27.

Walruses—unlike seals, which can swim for long periods at a time—have to "haul-out," or drag themselves onto rocks or ice to rest, and in recent years, with the loss of summer sea ice as a result of climate change, huge gatherings of walruses have taken place. The numbers are so large that some young individuals are killed in the stampede, and observers have also spotted several dozen carcasses on the beach.

During the winter, Pacific walruses spend their time in the Bering Sea, with sea ice used as a platform on which to give birth and launch dives to reach food on the shallow continental shelf. As the sea ice recedes north in summer, into the deep waters of the Arctic Ocean, the walruses can no longer reach the bottom to feed. It is this loss of sea ice that is forcing the animals to haul-out on the U.S. shores of the Chukchi Sea. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), large groups of walruses have also been gathering on the Russian side in recent years.

As the managing director of WWF's Arctic program, Margaret Williams, puts it, “[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 to address the root causes of climate change.”