Word: chukchi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black...
...Alaska, nothing suggests that the Chukchi Sea blob is toxic, though the Coast Guard's Hasenauer says toxicity tests are planned. In any case, virtually no commercial seafood production comes from the waters along Alaska's northern coast, but residents do fish, hunt whales and harvest other animals as part of a traditional subsistence lifestyle. In the meantime, the blob for the most part is staying away from the shoreline and slowly drifting farther away...
...effect that crude oil can have on a vulnerable marine environment: it is more toxic to life than we thought, and harder to clean up. "Even the best cleanup will fall short," says Craig Tillery, a deputy attorney general for the state of Alaska - whose Bristol Bay and Chukchi Sea are being considered for offshore oil and gas exploration - and a member of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which funded the NOAA studies. "You have to make sure this never happens...
Chivian and Cizik also led a 10-person expedition to Alaska last August to witness firsthand the impact climate change has had on the lives of the Inupiaq, whose island is eroding into the Chukchi...
Those oil- and gas-drilling leases include the $2 billion February sale of rights to 30 million acres of the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast, home to about a fifth of the world's remaining polar bears. Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity and the author of the initial petition to list the polar bear takes the opposite view; she figures the FWS decision was delayed to allow the sale to go through in the first place. Not surprising coming from an Administration Siegel calls rabidly "anti-wildlife." The scarcity of animals that have been listed...