Japan’s whaling ships have returned home from the Southern Ocean and are reporting the smallest take in years. Many, including the fleet’s leader, blame Sea Shepherd’s continual harassment for the deficit … which the Washington-state-based environmental group is happy to take credit for.
“We hit them long and hard this year and all our efforts and risks have paid off,” said Captain Paul Watson. “There are now 528 whales swimming freely in the Southern Ocean that would now be dead if not for the fact that we intervened. It is a happy day for my crew and I and conservationists worldwide, a happy day indeed.”
The take of both 507 was about half of last year’s hunt (935), the lowest numbers since the 2006-2007 season. The fleet’s leaders were said to be “furious” with Watson and his merry band, suggesting they would do anything – including leaving oil and boat parts behind in the Southern Ocean (a result of a collision between one of the Japanese whalers and Sea Shepherd’s high-end chase boat, the Ady Gil.
Coincidentally a decline in demand in Japan for whale meat has left the country with a nearly 5,000 ton surplus, which will be increased by the 1,800 tons brought home this season.
At the start of the season I talked with Watson about his hopes for the campaign.
Jon Bowermaster: Has your current campaign in the Southern Ocean been successful?
Captain Paul Watson: I believe it has been successful. Our strategy is an economic one. I don’t believe the Japanese whalers will back off on moral, ethical or scientific grounds but they will quit if they lose the one thing that is of most value to them – their profits. Our objective is to sink the Japanese whaling fleet – economically, to bankrupt them and we are doing that.
We have slashed their kill quotas in half over the last three years and negated their profits. They are tens of millions of dollars in debt on their repayment schedule for Japanese government subsidies. The newly elected Japanese government has pledged to cut their subsidies. I am actually confident that we can shut them down this year. They are on the ropes financially.
JB: How do you measure success? Fewer whales taken by Japanese? Other signs??
CPW: Of their quota of 935 Minke whales last year they fell short by 304. Of their quota of 50 Fin whales, they took only one. The year before they only took half their quota and in the last three years did not kill enough whales to break even so have been operating at a loss. We have also exposed their illegal whaling activities to the world and initiated a controversy and a discussion on whaling in the Japanese media.
JB: How do the Japanese continue to get away with the whale hunt when so many things say they shouldn’t, i.e. the Antarctica Treaty forbidding commerce below sixty degrees south latitude and the International Whaling Commission’s ban on all whaling?
CPW: There is a lack of economic and political motivation on the part of governments to enforce international conservation law. The Japanese whalers are targeting endangered and protected whales inside the boundaries of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on commercial whaling, in violation of the Antarctic Treaty that prohibits commercial activity south of sixty degrees and they are in contempt of the Australian Federal Court for continuing to kill whales in the Australian Antarctic Economic Exclusion Zone. There is no difference between Japanese whale poachers in Antarctica and elephant poachers in East Africa except that the Africans are black and impoverished.
JB: Do you know what the reaction among Japanese people – not scientists, not government – is towards the continued whale hunts?
CPW: I’m not actually concerned. I’m Canadian and the majority of Canadians are opposed to the commercial slaughter of seals but the Canadian government subsidizes it nonetheless. I believe it is a myth that once the people of a nation oppose something that things will change. First, most people are apathetic and could not care one way or another. Secondly, the pro-whalers have an economic motivation to lobby for continued whaling and thirdly in Japan it is considered inappropriate to oppose government or corporate policy. I’ve always felt that educating the Japanese public was a waste of time and smacks of cultural chauvinism. The fact is that whaling is illegal and we intervene for that reason and the key to ending it is the negation of profits.
Just as every day is different down south, every landscape is wildly different too.
We’ve moved to the other side of the Peninsula, the eastern edge of the five-hundred-mile long finger jutting out of the continent, into the Weddell Sea. We tried to get in here last year, by sailboat and kayak, but were shut out. The winter of 2007 had been a particularly cold one, even by Antarctic standards, and the entry to the Antarctic Sound had been blocked long into summer by a pair of giant icebergs, each tens of miles long. That blockage, combined with a lack of wind, meant that where we had hoped to paddle – circumnavigating Vega and James Ross islands – was choked by frozen sea, passes between the islands still filled by one and two year old ice.
Weddell Sea tabular
This year is very, very different. The winter of 2008 was warmer and windier and even though we’re a day away from the official start of summer, much of the Weddell is already clear of the same kind of thick pack we saw last year.
That said it is never a picnic over here. The landscape is stark, the islands short-hilled and rust-colored. Other than a solitary Argentine base, there’s no one around for one hundred miles, and you sense that remoteness. If more than 100,000 sizable bergs calve off the Antarctic continent each year, about one-third of them come from the glaciers lining the Weddell Sea. Remember in 2002, when a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island dramatically broke off from the Larsen B ice shelf? The Larsen B is just south of where I am today and some of that ice and its brothers and sisters are still grounded here. As I write I’m standing alongside a flat-topped berg a few stories tall and at least two miles long.
The ice here is different too. The sky is bright blue, the wind howling at thirty to forty miles an hour and I spend the better part of an hour looking through a spotting scope towards Seymour Island, following “the pack” being pushed by wind and current. It is miles wide, floating on the surface, exactly what you would not want to get caught in. Imagine being surrounded by a fast-moving pack tens of miles wide, unable to escape. You could be stuck for days, or worse.
The Weddell’s icebergs are mean and tough too, none of that soft, slushy stuff you might see at this time of year on the western side of the Peninsula. Hit one of these, and you’ll suffer. They are extremely hard, toughened by years of extreme cold and wind, often studded just below the surface by giant, sharp continental rock. Even the name of the water here is ominous – the Terror and Erebus Gulf – named for a pair of historical wooden sailing ships that first risked exploring the region.
At the north end of the channel, I take a long walk on Paulet Island, known for its 100,000 pairs of nesting Adelies. There are so many birds it is nearly impossible to clamber up the boulder-strewn beach. Beneath many of the birds peek the first chicks I’ve seen this year. As the day goes on, the sky grows evermore blue, the winds stronger.
Some of the 200,000 Adelie pengins on Paulet Island
Wind swept and rocky, islands in the Weddell Sea are vastly different than the opposite side of the Peninsula
ANTARCTICA EXPEDITIONS UPDATES
For a summary of who’s doing what down south this year by ski, kite and foot, check in with my friend Kraig Becker’s The Adventure Blog. While I remain curious about the various attempts, admiring of the incredible physical stamina each requires, when you’re on the edge of the continent as I am, all of that seems very … foreign … very far away.
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Took a long walk on the black volcanic sand beach inside the caldera of Deception Island this afternoon. Past massive rusted fuel storage tanks, whale oil processors and the fallen down wooden huts crushed in relatively recent years by volcanic eruptions. Once home to whalers, piles of wooden barrels (built by imported cooper smiths to carry whale oil back to South America and Europe, until the 1940s), randomly dropped whalebones and the rusted hulk of a floating dry dock are all accompanied by the odiferous sulfur vents of the still-active volcano.
Abandoned whaling shack on the beach at Deception Island
Deception – like all the South Shetland Islands – was part of the British Antarctica Territory, back when countries honored each other’s claims to the seventh continent.
All that ended in 1959, when originally twelve countries signed the international treaty that still governs the place. Today there are 52 signators to the treaty, which was last amended in a big way in 1991, in part to address growing concerns over the continent’s environmental protection. The new protocol specifically banned all oil and mineral exploitation in Antarctica until 2041.
In the next few months a small hullabaloo will be heard in the hallways of the treaty member offices because the U.K., Chile and Argentina have submitted new claims to nearly one-quarter of the continent. Here’s why: In May 2009 the U.N. Commission on Limits of the Continental Shelf meets to consider new applications. Those limits grant territories and states ‘ownership’ up to 350 miles out to sea from shore.
Until recently, no one has worried about who owns the continental shelf down here. It’s cold and icy most of the year, the temperature of the sea hovers just below freezing year-round and the whole seascape is most often studded with icebergs a half-mile long and ten stories tall.
But that’s all changing. Air temps are warming and so is the surface of the sea, which means the Peninsula’s ice is slowly melting. Today many suggest Antarctica is simply too remote and too difficult to exploit for oil, etc.
But that’s based on life on planet earth today, as we know it. Look to the future, towards 2041 … when the amendment regarding mineral exploitation is to be renewed. The planet’s human population will have jumped from 6.7 billion today to 9 billion. Even if incredible leaps in alternative energy are made, by then the planet’s oil reserves may well be tapped. And the ice along Antarctica’s Peninsula may have dissipated.
That combination – less ice, more worldwide demand for oil – could make for a new calculation regarding the practicality of coming to Antarctica to drill. With that as backdrop, think about why the U.K., Chile and Argentina want to get on record NOW in regard to who owns what. The more specific their claims are now the more ammunition they’ll have in the future if deep sea drilling, and other kinds, are one day possible here.
Things have come a long way from the whaling economy, which until the 1940s was the major industry in Antarctica, going back about sixty years. Who knows what challenges the continent will face six decades from now.
Burial sites of Norwegian whalers, from the 1940s.
Adelies in the mist
Photos, Fiona Stewart
Since 1959, with the signing of the international treaty that governs Antarctica, the continent is supposed to be devoted purely to science. That commitment was renewed in 1991, when the treaty was amended to extend protections against mineral exploitation and nationalistic claims and for increased environment protection. Today, though the science budget’s of the 28 nations that maintain bases in Antarctica are straining, that original pledge is mostly lived up to.
No one does science with more conviviality than the Ukrainians at their base in the Argentine Islands called Vernadsky. I stopped in yesterday for a visit with the thirteen scientists and support crew who have been here non-stop since last February; only the cook remained from my visit of the year before, when we stopped a couple times during our kayak expedition … one night closing down the southernmost bar on the Peninsula and having to carry an unnamed skipper down the wooden walk back to our boat. (I’m still searching for that photograph of my pal Pete McBride dancing in a size 60 DDD bra that I know is hidden somewhere on my computer ….)
Vernadsky Station, Argentine Islands
While the base’s reputation among Antarctic cognoscenti is for concocting the best home-brewed vodka in Antarctica, its 63-year meteorological record keeping may be the most valuable on the continent. As I walked the base yesterday, one chart kept in the weatherman’s office jumped out at me: A slowly rising line from left to right, beginning in 1945 – when the Brits built the base, then known as Faraday – and ending in 2008, charting the rise in average temperatures here on this island. In 1945, the average annual temp was -5.5 C (-10 F); this year, -2.3 C (-4.25 F).
Six degrees Fahrenheit warmer over the past fifty years makes it one of the greatest average temperature increases on the planet. And it’s not just thermometers that tell the story. Last year, for the first time anyone knows, the sea around the Argentine Islands never froze solid. This past year they had heavy snowfalls, thanks to a combination of the decrease of frozen sea (more open ocean means more evaporation and more precipitation) and warmer temperatures.
Clambering up a wooden ladder, I revisited the machine the Brits initially used to discover the ozone hole. The Ukrainians have kept up the monitoring of the atmospheric hole which appears each year over Antarctica; the current Mr. Ozone at the base showed me another graph, illustrating how the hole grows to its largest in August (25 million square kilometers) and shrinks to its smallest in December (12 million square kilometers). While the hole has been shrinking in recent years (thanks to an international ban on hole-causing CFCs) everyone at Vernadsky takes it very seriously. Everyday before they go outside they check its size and the sun’s strength … and on some days decide not to go out if the hole is big and sun penetrating, for fear of burning eyes and skin. Is it surprising they like a shot of powerful homemade vodka from time to time?
Subscribe
Become A Fan
Post A Comment