Kind: captions
Language: en
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you're watching a Nova Video
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podcast in the summer of 1915 The
Wailing ship Herman set out from San
Francisco sailing North to Alaska
the crew hunted in harpoon boohead
whales but they also found time for
sightseeing at gnome they visited a sled
dog
railroad at Port Clarence an Eskimo
summer fishing
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camp then the ship stopped at the Tiny
Village of gamble on St Lawrence a small
island in the northern reaches of the
cold Bearing
Sea the place was a time capsule the
upic people lived as they had for
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centuries it was as if the culture was
frozen in
time and in time it would begin to
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melt the global climate is changing the
world is warming the areas nearest the
poles are the first places to show the
effects the Bearing Sea is getting warm
and rising sea ice is receding
permafrost on land is melting species
are moving and some are
disappearing there are two groups of
people who have a particular interest in
these changes the residents of St
Lawrence island in the northern Bearing
Sea and the scientists who visit the
region every year aboard the Coast Guard
Cutter
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Healey the he is really a science
machine this ship can carry up to 45
scientists at a
time and all those people will be
working simultaneously to collect as
much information as we can during a
cruise we have people studying
everything from from whales to to Wares
to ERS I'm more of looking at the worms
and the clams in the bottom I'm
interested in how the variability of sea
ice both over space and over time
impacts the spring Bloom of algae
walruses walus walus boohead whales
copper pots and kill the chemical flow
of carbon nitrogen other
materials on this trip I really need to
figure out what lives in the sea ice you
know it's our first sampling ever doing
that kind of work and and so I'm I'm I
have some ideas I have some thoughts and
hypothesis but what I might see but I'm
not sure whether that is true or not so
at the end of these two weeks 3 week
period I I hope that I can can say okay
that is the kind of biology we see in
the SE I in the Bearing
Sea the Bearing Sea ice is matched
against steel all 420 ft of the Healey
is covered in Steel 2 in
thick this newest and largest polar
Icebreaker in the Coast Guard Fleet can
cruise at three knots through ice 5 ft
thick if the ice is even thicker the
heing becomes a battering ram backing up
and then crashing ahead through ice
Fields as thick as 8 ft repeating the
maneuver over and over again it's a
demolition derby in the name of science
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the boats that have carried the upic
people on the Bearing Sea are somewhat
older models they're wrapped not with
steel but with walrus
hide cured and stretched it becomes the
watertight skin that has covered the
boats of St Lawrence Island for
centuries I prefer these skin boats
they're much more reliable than these
aluminum
boats when you're on aluminum boat it
makes too many
noise especially on the young ice about
2 in to 3 in
thick gear your game
away when they when they put these
together they use a
senu from uh whales Inu muscles and they
do the pretty much same thing like whale
Waller skin they stretch that senu they
put a weight on it tie one end to the
ceiling and put a weight on the bottom
kind of stretch
it the Bearing Sea is more than a
familiar Waterway to the upix it is
their tap rout their common and ancient
Heritage but for most Americans it's a
distant and exotic place a vast oval of
water between the bearing straight and
the Illusions the Bearing Sea touches
two continents joins two great oceans
spans hemispheres it's huge one one and
a half times the size of Alaska and
wondrous the sea is a rich broth of Life
home to 26 species of marine mammals
including 12 kinds of whales and over
450 species of crustations and
fish some 20 million seabirds breed in
the Bearing Sea the area has most of the
world's polar bears most of the world's
Northern fur seals and the highest
concentration of Pacific walrus on Earth
it's a zoo up there and in this Northern
Zoo the key element is
ice there are many words uh to describe
various ice conditions here uh uh
generally you say C ice right now the
ice that we're on is called
duvak that's the term we use for sh fast
ice and this uh little piece of ice the
one with the flat passing ice is called
is a cake of ice go is a it's it's a ice
that comes in from the North Pole sash
sash is the youngest ICE 2 in of snow
inch just
forming real thin ice they used to them
days they used to let the dogs out first
check the ice see if it's good to walk
on if the dogs don't go in the thin ice
that means ready to go out hunting
St Lawrence island is a vestage of the
land bridge that once connected Asia to
North America on a clear day you can see
Siberia from the Island's western shore
about 1500 people live here most of them
of Siberian ancestry but the island is
part of Alaska and its people are US
citizens before the 20th century almost
everything they used came from their
immediate environment
their food clothing boats sleds even
their
houses there were underground houses we
call them
NLOS and we use a whale bone to stick
them up out like that put some Tundra on
top of it and they're real good they're
warm too and there's some walers hide
inside and some seal skin and all kinds
of hides in there sea loyal lamp you
know to heat up the house
too the natives of Alaska say that the
sea is our garden we live off uh the
ocean we get this sea mammals wallers
whales
seals uh
birds and uh most of our activities
revolve
around harvesting a game like that
throughout the whole year preparation of
our skin boats even in the summer you
know for next year's
use and uh it's kind of a cycle that
was uh consistent all the time and uh
and very predictable and that's when
things were
normal what we've been seeing in the
last 10 to 15 years is a decline and the
ice coming down from the
north last year we had the highest
Retreat on satellite records in 2007 and
so the question is what's going to
happen this year right now we have high
the Isis down far south but it's very
thin so with this ship it'll be like
butter to go through uh we don't have
any multi-year ice down south S Lawrence
Island so we'll we'll move pretty
quickly
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