After the Ice

by Alun Anderson

  These are grim forecasts, but the USGS rightly says they are “conservative.” They are based on those computer models that, as we have already seen, do not succeed in keeping up with the true speed of the collapse of the ice. If the more pessimistic models, like that of Wieslaw Maslowski, which predicts ice-free Arctic summers by 2013, turn out to be correct, then polar bears are going to be in very serious trouble within the next ten years. Just like those forecasts about the sea-ice area, we may have to move forward the forecasts about bears by fifty to sixty years.

  The ringed seal is not nearly as photogenic as the bear, and it is harder to excite the public about its fate or to find research grants to study it. Even so the U.S. Center for Biological Diversity has petitioned for a “threatened” or “endangered” listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act for the ringed seal, along with the bearded, ribbon, and spotted seals, and the walrus. For the seals, an official review is now under way. In early 2009, small unmanned aircraft were used for the first time to survey the ice off the coast of Alaska and begin a seal population count.

  Shaye Wolf, a marine biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, is leading the charge. She has already seen the power of science when her own seabird studies in Baja California helped to stop the development of a huge liquid natural gas terminal. Now, she believes that early warning signals for the ringed seals and other marine mammals are coming in loud and clear.9 “The same studies that show that polar bears are suffering as the Hudson Bay ice breaks up earlier each year also show that ringed seals are affected,” she explains. “The sea ice breaks up before the pups are fully weaned, so they have to leave their mother before they are fully developed and enter the water.”

  Across the Arctic in Svalbard, Wolf says ringed seals are failing to breed as the ice disappears northward. To find out more, I tracked down Kit Kovacs, a Canadian who studies whales, seals, and bears at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø.10 “We haven’t seen ice on the west coast of Svalbard since 2005,” she said. “For as long as we’ve been looking, the west coast of Svalbard has been one of the best areas for ringed seal reproduction. Now there has been virtually nothing since 2005.” Nothing at all, I said in astonishment. “Correct,” she replied.

  Maybe the seals have moved farther north where there is still ice? But that turns out to be a forlorn hope on my part. “Up in the northeast corner of Svalbard, there has been ice,” she says, “but it’s been very unstable, moving ice, not the kind of ice that ringed seals need. They need land-fast ice or large free-floating pack ice that isn’t going to crush them. They need a stable platform for a minimum of eight weeks to get the business of reproduction done. So in 2010, the baby seals that should be coming into the population as adults, breeding for the first time, simply won’t be there.”

  Ringed seals live all around the Arctic and there are still many millions of them.11 But these observations from Svalbard show that the moment they lose the ice that they need to give birth to their young, their future becomes bleak.

  The walrus—which comes in separate Pacific, Atlantic, and Laptev Sea varieties with the Pacific walrus making up 90 percent of the worldwide population of around 300,000 animals—is the Arctic’s most charismatic big beast after the bear.12 Its great bulk (Pacific males may weigh close to 3,000 pounds), thick skin, and fearsome tusks make it secure even from polar bears. An injured animal or a pup might be attacked, but an encounter with an adult walrus will usually go badly for the bear. That might be why a big walrus seems so self-confident. A sleeping walrus on an ice floe barely bothers to raise its head for a few passing humans and just slumbers on like a giant slug. A solitary human close to a walrus beach may excite just a little curiosity. I’ve sat and waited on a beach while a walrus or two hauled themselves up closer and closer to take a better look at me with their watery, lugubrious eyes. (Curiously, they seem to find me more interesting if I sing loudly. The same trick works well for seals too.) I know it is time to move off when they are so close I begin to smell their notoriously bad breath. The fringe of sensitive whiskers around their mouth enables them to find shellfish by touch in the dark and muddy sea bottom, but their diet comes with a distinctive smell; I’ve only encountered worse when paddling downwind of a sleeping humpback whale.

  Walrus may be large, strong, well-armed, and smelly, but they too are dependent on ice. In summer, Pacific walrus females and their pups leave the males and travel with the ice edge as it retreats north, through the Bering Strait and into the Chukchi Sea. The ice is a perfect moving platform for mother and young cubs, who nurse for at least a full year. As the ice edge heads north, it carries them across the shallow seas where there are plenty of clams to eat.

  Or at least, that is what used to happen. Now, in bad years, the ice is retreating so far north that it ends up in the deeper Arctic Ocean where there is no food to be found. At the USGS’s Alaska Science Center, Chad Jay has been following walrus movements. In part, he explained, that means creeping up on a walrus armed with a crossbow and firing a dart equipped with a radio transmitter into its blubbery back. That does not worry the walrus too much: the skin on an adult is about an inch and a half thick and there are another couple of inches of blubber underneath that. And as Jay can hit a walrus from thirty feet, it is not too scary for the animal or for him.

  Jay has been seeing that when the ice retreats far in the deep Arctic, walruses are forced to abandon the ice and try to make a living from the shore. The result can be catastrophic. “We saw upwards of several thousand female walruses and their young coming to shore in Alaska in 2007. The same thing happened in the north coast of Chukotka on a much more dramatic scale where tens of thousands of walruses took to land. Russian colleagues saw stampedes into the water and often the little ones got trampled and died,” he told me.

  If the ice vanishes even earlier, during the pupping season, an adult walrus may simply have to abandon its pups. That seems to have happened in 2006 when researchers came across the sad sight of a group of crying baby walruses far out to sea off the Alaskan coast. All were too young to survive on their own and probably drowned. That year the sea had been especially warm. Normally, a walrus mother keeps her pups close by, leaving them on the ice only when she has to dive for food to the shallow seas, or when the pups have to rest. If the ice melts away too rapidly, the pups may not be able to keep up with its retreat, or the ice may be too far from places the mother can go to find food. Sometimes, on a long swim, a mother may carry her pup on her back, but there are limits. The pups may have to be left behind.

  Carin Ashjian, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who studies whales and the plankton that they eat, was one of the team of researchers on board the coast guard cutter Healy that came across the pups. “We are not walrus scientists. It was an accidental discovery that we wanted to get out as soon as we could. As far as we know this is something totally new. No one has ever reported seeing abandoned baby walruses out in deep water before,” she told me. With just one observation it is hard to be sure if it is a sign of what is coming, but the team concluded that if the walrus “cannot adapt to caring for their young in shallow waters without sea ice available as a resting platform between dives to the seafloor, a significant population decline of this species could occur.”13

  We are even less sure of the risks to the Arctic’s three whales: the bowhead, the narwhal, and the beluga. “It may sound strange,” says Kovacs, “but although the whales are all closely associated with ice, we can’t be sure if ice is essential to them or not.”

  Traveling off the coast of northern Greenland one August, I had the good luck to see narwhal surface among the ice. For a brief moment, three improbably long spiral horns broke through the water and waved above the sea like magic wands. One animal twisted around and, for a second, his gray, wet body glistened in the low sunlight. Then they all dived and were gone. I stayed for an hour searching the sea for them, but they never returned and I have not seen one since.

&
nbsp; Strange though it may seem, we still do not know what that long spiral tusk is for, so many centuries after it was first passed off as the horn of a unicorn. As early as 1250, the Norwegian book The King’s Mirror recorded how it was possible to grow rich trading their tusks from Greenland.14 The royal scepter in England is made from narwhal and so is the frame of the Danish royal throne. But what the narwhal needs that tusk for is less clear. Biologists have proposed that it could be a tool for digging the seafloor or breaking ice, a weapon for fighting other narwhal, an instrument of hearing, or even for spearing fish. I tried asking Kristin Laidre from the University of Washington in Seattle what she thought. She spends her summers in Qaanaaq, in the very far north of Greenland, tagging narwhal to try to find out where they go and what they eat. “It’s clearly not used for anything critical to survival,” she said, “because only males have a tusk.” She has observed narwhal at the surface, crossing their tusks “in a gentle, almost balletlike manner, usually there are two or three males with a female very close to them.” She sees the tusk as analogous to the peacock’s showy tail.

  The bowhead is well adapted to the Arctic, with a huge, strong head that allows it to break through ice and thicker blubber than any other whale. It also has more baleen—the hairy plates around the whale’s mouth that it uses to sieve food from the water—than other whales as it relies on mopping up patches of plankton from the Arctic seas. Its population seems to be slowly growing now as it recovers from centuries of human hunting, but its numbers are still small with only 8,000 to 9,000 left in the whole Arctic.15

  Beluga and narwhal both like ice, too, but it can also be a terrible enemy to them. Schools of these whales are sometimes trapped by ice in small areas of open water, called savssats by Inuit hunters, and cannot swim far enough to reach the next hole where they can breathe. As the freeze continues and ice closes in on them, indigenous hunters and polar bears take advantage of this unexpected feast.

  All three of these whales may like to be near ice only because it helps protect them from predatory killer whales. Amid dense pack ice, killer whales are at a disadvantage because their enormous sail-like pectoral fin makes it harder for them to find a place to surface.

  “Beluga can probably use ice as a refuge to hide out,” explains Rod Hobbs, a biologist from the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who has been tracking beluga around the Arctic, especially the small population living in Cook Inlet near Anchorage.16 “Beluga are one of the few cetaceans that have a fairly well-articulated neck,” he said. “They can tip their head forward into a position more like a human head with their blowhole at the top. That means that they can get into fairly narrow spots to breathe.” Beluga have been tracked off the coast of Alaska as far as 83° north latitude, where the ice cover is 90 percent, although that is not so common.

  Narwhal really seem to love lots of ice, but that might be because they are very good at finding food under it. “We don’t know if they go out to the center of Baffin Bay in winter because they like to be in 99 percent ice cover, or because it is a good place to feed,” says Kristin Laidre. “My guess is that it is probably a good place to feed and that narwhal essentially evolved to exploit a habitat that no other marine mammal can exploit, and so they have it all to themselves. There are predictable concentrations of prey so it’s a very smart strategy. If you can adapt to that environment it is a good place to go.”

  As the Arctic changes, Laidre thinks that the narwhal will find the future tough. “It has a relatively small population worldwide, and it is a real specialist in terms of what it eats and where it goes: this doesn’t really seem to suggest that the animal will be able to adapt to change.” Beluga are similar in size to narwhal, but they are more easily able to live away from ice. “They can swim up into the dense pack ice like narwhals, but they also live in muddy estuaries. They can swim up rivers, live in ice-free areas and feed on anything. They will eat whatever swims by, whereas we have found only four or five prey species in the stomachs of narwhal,” she explains.

  Hobbs agrees. “They can live in areas of a lot of ice, but in Cook Inlet there’s ice in the winter but not in the summer, so they are adaptable to areas without ice. They seem to do well in rivers where salmon and eulachon run. As the Arctic warms, some rivers with salmon runs will decline but others farther north may pick up. I think beluga will be able to find a place to go.”

  I’m not really too surprised. There are thought to be around 120,000 beluga spread over the Arctic but only 55,000 narwhal, 17 most of them living in Baffin Bay: as change comes and all its special creatures face the cruel mantra of “move, adapt, or die,” beluga may turn out to be the lucky generalists.

  In 2008, a team of six well-known Arctic marine mammal researchers tried to put together everything they knew about the different factors threatening the big mammals in the region, with the vanishing ice as the biggest stress, and to work out which creatures were most at risk.18 Just as we might expect, narwhal and polar bear come out as most sensitive to change, then bowhead, beluga, and walrus.

  Laidre was one of that team along with Steven Ferguson, an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Manitoba who has spent the last couple of decades studying many of the big mammals of the Arctic. Like many Canadian researchers now, he works closely with Inuit hunters who have often seen more of the animals than the scientists who come to study them. I asked Ferguson if there were any gleams of hope, especially for the ringed seal. I was to be disappointed. “I think all of the ice-dependent species are in trouble, in quite big trouble if we lose ice. But if we have to compare among them then I think narwhal and polar bears are probably ones that we should be most worried about. But definitely, ringed seals and bearded seals are really going to be in trouble as we lose the sea ice. We tried to compare the different ice-adapted species but generally the future doesn’t look good for any of them.”

  That sad conclusion is not the end of the story. I can best explain by turning outside of science to a pack of medieval tarot cards. It’s a pack I know well, having earned a little money as a fortune teller when I was a student (a safer bet than playing poker). In that pack there is one card that you would prefer not to turn over during a reading. That card is “Death.” It shows a grinning skeleton with a scythe in a field littered with limbs and a severed head with a gold crown. How that card was interpreted in the fifteenth century I hate to think, but nowadays it is no longer read as an “end,” but as a transformation, a new beginning. There it joins in spirit another card, “The Wheel,” which shows beasts on a great wheel, some falling while others rise.

  The Arctic is undergoing a transformation on a great scale, larger than anything that has been seen on this planet in human history. The king of the Arctic, the polar bear, is going to lose his crown, and be mourned, but that will not be the end. Another creature is coming to replace him at the top of the food chain in the new Arctic.

  Chapter Ten

  THE BOTTOM OF THE WEB

  Every ship I have traveled on through the Arctic ice has always had a few keen naturalists on board. They’ll be up on deck, night and day, scanning the horizon with their binoculars, and quite a few will have a camera with a giant telephoto lens at the ready. Usually I am up there with them as there is a special thrill to spotting a distant bear or a walrus lying on the ice like a big, fat contented slug. Passing a walrus you’ll always hear the same joke about its penis bone (the baculum), which gives it a permanent erection—a fact that the male walrus finds hard to conceal. Then there are the birds that come along unexpectedly: murre flying home in a straggling line, a group of tiny dovekie settling on the ice, or a long-tailed jaeger performing acrobatics overhead. (Or was it a pomarine jaeger? There will always be someone to quickly correct you if you make a mistake.) The distant fog of a whale blow gets people most excited of all: did the shape of the plume and the brief flash of a fluke mean that it was minke, fin, humpback, or something really rare? We all search the distant seas hoping to see it ag
ain and be the first to shout, “Blow!”

  Sometimes I try to persuade my shipmates that there is something else to see besides the birds and the beasts. You can get an occasional glimpse of another side of Arctic life if you look down at the floating slabs of ice as they are pushed aside by the ship’s bow. The surface of the ice will be pure white, shading into blues and grays depending on the light, but as the ship passes by and the ice floes rock back and forth, you’ll sometimes catch a flash of pale browns and deep greens hidden under the water line. These are algae growing on the ice. If you can persuade someone to haul a block of ice on board and crack it open, you’ll see that the stain of color runs up inside the ice as well.

  We are seeing the source of all life in the Arctic.1 The algae growing inside and under the ice, along with many more that live in the sea where the ice has turned into open water, capture the sun’s energy and power everything that lives among the Arctic seas.

  This is the bottom of the Arctic food chain, the base of the pyramid on which everything else rests. Zooplankton eat the algae, fish eat them in their turn, and so on upward to seals and birds and polar bears and to man, too, for two areas of the Arctic, the Bering Sea and the Barents Sea, are among the world’s most productive fishing grounds. Any change that happens down here, at the bottom of this web, may alter the shape of the whole web of life in the Arctic seas.

  That is as much as I can explain to my naturalist shipmates, who say “how interesting” and turn back to the horizon to look for something bigger and more important, leaving me with a block of stained ice which has been judged unfit for use in the ship’s bar. I’d need some equipment, a microscope at minimum, to take them onto the next step. If I could zoom in on the inside of that block of ice, I could show that it is riddled with a labyrinth of tiny tunnels. Inside the ice there is an unseen and wonderful world that they would find hard to believe. Within it are algae, tiny grazers that eat the algae, and the tiny predators that eat the grazers in their turn. It is a microcosm of the larger world above that my shipmates are looking at with binoculars.