Breathing The Oceans Alive
By Eleanor O’Hanlon
It is late September off the Russian coast of Bering Strait. I’m travelling by umiak – the walrus skin boat that is the traditional craft of the region’s Yupik people – through the Senyiavin Strait, and heading for the island of Arakamchechen where we will camp tonight.
A great flock of sea-birds sweeps along the cold indigo swell; they wheel, dart and plunge through the waves, shivering the air with their cries. A wide brown-orange plume stains the water where the birds have gathered: its pungent odour travels towards us on the wind. The plume shows where a gray whale rose up and defecated, bringing the birds to feed on the riches it contains.
The gray whales gather in these Arctic and sub-Arctic waters, to feed on the crustaceans that live in the sea-bed below. When they defecate on the surface, the whales circulate their nutrients – drawing them up from the bottom layers and sending them into the light-filled surface waters, where they feed the birds and nourish the plankton that weave the very foundations of the ocean’s food web.
That night we camped on the shores of Arakamchechen. Two great bowhead jawbones rose fifteen feet or more from the tundra behind our tent; their skulls were set in pairs all along the shore. Russian archaeologists call this place Whale Alley; and describe it as a “sacred precinth”, the most extensive ritual site yet discovered in the Arctic.
This shore was a place of sacred meeting between the Yupik people of the Bering Strait and the whales who sustained their lives. Our ancestors went there for the ceremony of blessing for the sea, the Yupik elder lady Ainana told me later: it was their place of ritual, of prayer and purification. For the health and well-being of the whole human community – both physical and spiritual – were known to depend on the quality of their relationships with the bowheads and other whales.
That night we camped on the shores of Arakamchechen. Two great bowhead jawbones rose fifteen feet or more from the tundra behind our tent; their skulls were set in pairs all along the shore. Russian archaeologists call this place Whale Alley; and describe it as a “sacred precinth”, the most extensive ritual site yet discovered in the Arctic.
This shore was a place of sacred meeting between the Yupik people of the Bering Strait and the whales who sustained their lives. Our ancestors went there for the ceremony of blessing for the sea, the Yupik elder lady Ainana told me later: it was their place of ritual, of prayer and purification. For the health and well-being of the whole human community – both physical and spiritual – were known to depend on the quality of their relationships with the bowheads and other whales.
Their solemnity and reverence remained palpable, between the bowhead jawbones and their skulls. For no traditional Yupik hunter would take their lives carelessly: the people and the whales were bonded together in a flow of gratitude and giving. The whales fed the people with their flesh; the people nourished the whales with their prayers, their elevated thoughts, their deep, awe-filled respect.
Today we are just as dependent on the great whales as those Yupik ancestors.
The difference is – we do not realise it as they did.
Slowly, though, we are learning that the whales are maintaining the vital processes on which our own lives depend. For the marine plankton the whales nourish and sustain are absorbing carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen on a planetary scale, and this is a crucial part of the climate cycle.
When these plankton die, they settle on the deep sea floor, drawing down carbon and storing it there in silt. This vast circulation of plankton is currently estimated to absorb roughly half the carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Whales do not only shape the life of the oceans, and allow it to thrive – they are helping to regulate and balance the climate across the entire planet – interweaving the wind and the waves, the air and ocean – conscious, benign participants in the sustaining of life for their own well-being and the good of all.