Carl Safina explores what had been lost with the vanishing of the great whales in the Southern Ocean, from decades of ungoverned slaughter well before the Japanese research hunts that are now outlawed: cnn/2014/04/01/opinion/safina-japan-whaling/ Down along the Antarctic Peninsula on a penguin-research expedition, we find that the beach at King George Island is strewn with bigger-than-dinosaur bones of great whales, cast off after the whales were stripped of flesh. A whale vertebrae the size of a hassock makes a good seat for jotting a few notes. Then, like children making up a game, well try to walk a couple hundred yards on the bones of whales killed by human beings, without stepping on the sand. Its quite do-able. One skull -- a blue whale -- measures 12 feet across, eye to eye. Lengthwise, from tip-of-jaw to back-of-skull, we pace it out at 27 boot-lengths. The jawbone is so big around that it comes up past our knees. We look at each other, then glance seaward, knowing that the now-silent bay should be spouting whales.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 20:48:09 +0000
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