10,000 walruses have camped out on an Alaskan beach after the melting of ice has left them with no choice but to seek land.
10,000 walruses have gathered, their number slowly growing since September 12, onto a small stretch of a beach on one of the small islands in the Chukchi Sea.
The melting of the walrus' prime habitat, ice floes, is evidence of slowly warming climate.
With 10,000 walruses packed in only one kilometer of land, such crowding has terrible risks, experts say. One small scare will bring thousands of these great beasts scrambling for safety, causing a stampede that leaves the more vulnerable of their numbers, mostly the young, at risk of being crushed to death.
After a 2009 stampede at Alaska's Icy Cape, 130 young walruses were discovered dead, their corpses littering the beach after the stampede had cleared.
Stampedes can be triggered by polar bears, humans, and low-flying aircraft. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service has taken steps to keep people and aircraft away from the scene to prevent stampedes, working with local villages and plane owners. Stampedes can even cause injury to humans, as a walrus weighs up to 3,700 pounds...so a large herd of them may not be the best thing to see coming your way.
The herd of walrus has since been coming to shore since the beginning of September.
These Pacific walruses typically spend their winters in the Bering Sea, with females producing offspring on the sea ice and also use the ice as a diving platform to reach sustenance such as clams, snails and worms in the relatively shallow continental shelf. As the sea recedes north towards the warmer summers, female walruses and their babies ride out the edge of the sea into the Chuckchi sea , but in recent times the sea has receded way beyond the continental shelf waters and deep into the Arctic ocean which is beyond 10,000 feet, which Walrus are incapable of diving into.
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