“Some are 50 feet long and weigh 50 tons and can sustain many people.
“We can no longer take the larger whales,” said Herman Ahsoak, a 55-year-old whaling captain and local assembly member, who has seen the impact up close. The centuries-old practice of subsistence whale hunting is still legal in Utqiagvik, Alaska, but like much of the traditional way of life in this isolated outpost 720 miles north of Anchorage, global warming has made it much more difficult and dangerous. Nine miles north of the northernmost town in America, on the shoreline of the Arctic ocean, the twisted ribs and jaws of more than a dozen bowhead whales have been scattered across the anthracite sand by the locals who caught and killed them for food.īy late October, the water should have frozen over, but instead, it laps up against chunks of blubber and skin that humans have not collected and polar bears had not yet found. The stench is overpowering, as if an open air fishmonger has been built on a petrol station forecourt and everything is rotting. The snowstorm settles just after sunrise and the boneyard comes into view. Visit our World News homepage during the Cop26 conference for more original reporting This is one in a series of dispatches and reports examining the impact climate change has already had on our planet.
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