ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An estimated 10,000 Pacific walrus have gone ashore on Alaska’s northwest coast and are bunched along a beach near the village of Point Lay.
The National Marine Fisheries Service says 1,500 to 4,000 walrus were counted Sept. 12 and numbers had swollen to 10,000 on Friday.
The animals are counted using aerial photographs.
Walrus historically use sea ice to rest as they dive for clams and other food on the ocean bottom. Chukchi Sea walrus in 2007 began showing up in large numbers on Alaska’s shore in late summer.
A chilly Arctic summer has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 29 per cent.
The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
Others believe that there is a track record of global temperatures swinging from a season of warming to a season of cooling just as there is a yearly cycle, there appears to be a season of a decade or so. This observation known as science is what we have seen over a century of record keeping.
The walruses, meanwhile, are in no immediate danger if they will disperse.
