World Walrus Day - November 24 #shorts

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The Pacific walrus needs sea ice year-round for giving birth, nursing their young and resting. Over the past decade, climate change has caused summer sea ice to disappear from the walrus’s shallow foraging grounds in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea.
Without summer sea ice for resting, walrus mothers and calves have been forced ashore in huge numbers, where they have limited access to food and are vulnerable to being trampled to death, attacked by predators or crowded into dangerous places looking for space to rest — like the edge of a cliff.

The first major documentation of warming-related walrus deaths was in 2007 when 3,000 Pacific walruses were trampled to death on Russian shores after receding summer sea ice drove them to haul out in mass. Since then, massive walrus haul-outs have been documented year after year when sea ice disappears.
And it’s not only summer sea ice that’s melting out from under walruses. During the past years, winter sea ice in Alaska’s Bering Sea hit record lows, falling to levels that hadn’t been projected for another 40 to 50 years.