North Pole Rabbit Hole

The disappearance of Arctic sea ice is wreaking havoc on the lives of walruses

Weighing up to 4,500 pounds (2,000 kg), walruses generally move rather slowly.

But they are moving rather quickly through the process of being listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS).

According to a recent AP story, the FWS "announced that a petition presented by the Center for Biological Diversity provided substantial information that listing the walrus as threatened or endangered was warranted."

Arctic sea ice is a critical part of the walrus habitat. They dive from the sheets of ice in order to hunt for food, like clams. They also use it to breed. But because of man-caused global warming, the sea ice is retreating, forcing huge numbers of walruses to remain confined to land.

"Masses of lumbering walruses have been crowding on beaches and rocks along the Russian and American sides of the Bering Strait in the absence of the coastal sea ice that normally serves as a late-summer haven and nursery," writes Andrew Revkin in a recent New York Times article.

Revkin notes that "there has been growing confirmation that the walrus is suffering substantial losses as the sheath of sea ice in coastal waters erodes in the summer," adding, "Last month, a team from the World Wildlife Fund reported seeing 20,000 walruses on the shore at Cape Schmidt, Russa. In that same area, scientists in 2007 reported several thousand crushing deaths after tens of thousands of walruses crowded on the shoreline."

"I like the Walrus best," said Alice, the young protagonist from Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus & the Carpenter," a poem which appeared in his classic 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass.

If the massive pinniped doesn't receive some official protections soon and global warming continues to decimate its habitat, it may one day exist only down Alice's rabbit hole.

GET INVOLVED

• Adopt a walrus from the World Animal Foundation
• Submit a comment during the Fish & Wildlife Service public comment period through November 9 by visiting the Federal eRulemaking Portal at http://www.regulations.gov, searching for docket FWS-R7-2009-0051 and then following the instructions (U.S. citizens)
• Sign the "We Can Solve It" petition for a global treaty on climate change
• Analyze and reduce your impact on the environment with the National Grid Floe

RELATED POSTS

• Four Degrees (September 29, 2009)
• The Arctic Has a Hotseat, and Man Is Behind the Wheel (September 17, 2009)
• Closing Off the Arctic (July 23, 2009)
• A Sisyphean Climate Challenge for the G8 (July 9, 2009)
• The Pot Is Boiling (July 2, 2009)
• Gone in 75 Years: Polar Bears (June 29, 2009)
• Congress Tackles Climate Change (June 24, 2009)
• EDITORIAL: Polar Transcendentalism (May 11, 2009)
• Selling the Arctic's Future to the Oil Industry (March 6, 2009)
• North Pole May Be Ice-Free in Five Years (August 12, 2008)
• Meeting a Walrus (May 25, 2008)
  

image: Captain Budd Christman, NOAA Corps