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Tens of thousands of walruses camp out on Alaska shore because sea ice melting profusely
Topic Started: Sep 14 2010, 07:44 PM (56 Views)
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Tens of thousands of walruses camp out on Alaska shore because sea ice melting profusely
Published: Monday, September 13, 2010 | 4:19 PM ET
Canadian Press Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Tens of thousands of walruses have come ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest on has melted.

U.S. government scientists say this massive move to shore by walruses is unusual in the United States. But it has happened at least twice before, in 2007 and 2009. In those years Arctic sea ice also was at or near record low levels.
The walruses "stretch out for one mile (1.6k) or more. This is just packed shoulder-to-shoulder," U.S. Geological Survey biologist Anthony Fischbach said in a telephone interview from Alaska. He estimated their number at tens of thousands.

Scientists with two federal agencies are most concerned about the one-ton (0.90 metric tons) female walruses stampeding and crushing each other and their smaller calves near Point Lay, Alaska, on the Chukchi Sea. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to change airplane flight patterns to avoid spooking the animals. Officials have also asked locals to be judicious about hunting, said agency spokesman Bruce Woods.

The federal government is in a year-long process to determine if walruses should be put on the endangered species list.
Fischbach said scientists do not know how long the walrus camp-out will last, but there should be enough food for all of them.
During normal summers, the males go off to play in the Bering Sea, while the females raise their young in the Chukchi. The females rest on sea ice and dive from it to the sea floor for clams and worms.
"When they no longer have a place to rest, they need to go some place and it's a long commute," Fischbach said. "This is directly related to the lack of sea ice."

Loss of sea ice in the Chukchi this summer has surprised scientists because last winter lots of old established sea ice floated into the region, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. But that has disappeared.
Although last year was a slight improvement over previous years, Serreze says there's been a long-term decline that he blames on global warming.

"We'll likely see more summers like this," he said. "There is no sign of Arctic recovery."

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Online
U.S. Geological Survey walrus research site: http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/walrus/index.html

The National Snow and Ice Data Center: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html

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awake
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The storm they had here in Newfoundland has a bearing to what you say. The storm was between NL. and the offshore rigs. The damage was the water ; main reason for the hardship.
Newfoundland does n_o_t_ have a lot of topsoil . It was all scraped off during the ice age. This is why we didn't see a lot of mud.
There is a lot of march land here that holds the water boggy. This was dried out and couldn't hold water and presto couldn't hold that much water back.
There would have been flooding but it would have been less had we had a normal summer.

The rock lost a lot of rock because of global warming ..
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