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our thousand spills--over one a day--recorded by the oil industry in its land operations in the last decade, and keeping in mind that offshore hazards are far greater, the inevitable accidents seem certain to accumulate into an ongoing and permanent calamity. A black effluvia of crude petroleum and drilling mud and chemical pollutants would spread inshore, suffocating plankton and invertebrates and bottom-dwelling fish and poisoning great stretches of Arctic coast with a viscous excrescence. The same toxic mixture will blacken the drifting ice, fouling the pristine habitat of Arctic birds, the Pacific walrus, four species of seals, and the beleaguered polar bear, while contaminating the migratory corridors of the white beluga and endangered bowhead whales—all this defilement made much worse by the grim fact that no technology has ever been developed for cleaning up spilled oil in icy waters. Even in spills in temperate waters, such as the Exxon Valdez disaster, only an average of
less than 15 percent is ever removed.An immediate threat to Inupiat culture is the disruption of animal habitats and whale migrations caused by
seismic testing, in which arrays of powerful airguns shoot sound waves through the sea floor in search of deep rock formations that might hold gas or oil. "The underwater noise produced by seismic airguns...is among the most intense sounds ever generated by humankind.... The potential harm is enormous," according to Dr. Christopher W. Clark, a marine biologist and undersea acoustics specialist at Cornell.
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Very short bursts of very high energy noise are exploded within the ocean and injected into the earth. Those explosions are repeated over and over again, twenty-four hours a day, for days on end...going off every 9–12 seconds. They represent the most severe acoustic insult to the marine environment I can imagine short of naval warfare.[3]
Seismic testing has been shown to cause significant mortality in fish eggs and larvae, and while permanent harm to adult animals has not been researched , it can scarcely be doubted that physical and neurological damage will result. Yet seismic prospecting (minimally monitored for the bowhead whale, an officially recognized endangered species) is still permitted before leases for ocean drilling are issued, and the leases stipulate no protection of wild creatures against loss of habitat or other harm that might impair their chances of survival.
Even without disruptions such as seismic testing, the rapid withdrawal of the ice is truly ominous for Arctic wildlife, since the melting edges of the ice pack are where life proliferates in the twenty-four-hour light of spring and summer. The profusion of phytoplankton and sea algae attracts fish and birds and also the bowhead, which consumes plankton; the beluga feeds along the ice edge on the small Arctic cod. Of the four seal species, the bearded and ringed seals are entirely ice-dependent, and the preferred habitat of the Pacific walrus, too, is drifting ice, which carries it over the rich mollusk beds from which it feeds. Warming has already set in motion an ecological chain reaction as the ice-edge cod, which feed the ringed seals, which feed the polar bears, follow the retreating sea ice farther and farther from the coast...
