About 35,000 walruses in Alaska flocked a remote coastline as melting arctic ice becomes too big of an issue due to climate change, according to experts.
A bizarre phenomenon that was photographed and captured on camera is making a huge buzz on the Internet lately after experts accounted climate change as the primary reason why 35,000 walruses flocked along an Alaska beach because they were unable to find sea ice in the Arctic waters, reported The Telegraph.
The images and footage were reportedly taken on Saturday over 5 miles north of Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo village which is around 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The 35,000 walruses in Alaska could be seen gathering the remote coastline in some of the photos as though they have been washed ashore.
"The walruses are hauling out on land in a spectacle that has become all too common in six of the last eight years as a consequence of climate-induced warming," the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement. "Summer sea ice is retreating far north of the shallow continental shelf waters of the Chukchi Sea in U.S. and Russian waters, a condition that did not occur a decade ago. To keep up with their normal resting periods between feeding bouts to the seafloor, walruses have simply hauled out onto shore."
The bizarre gathering of the sea creatures was spotted during NOAA's annual arctic marine mammal aerial survey, said a spokesman for the agency.
Experts now believe that the unusual gathering of the nearly 35,000 walruses is basically due to the loss of summer sea ice because of the warming of the climate.
They said that female pacific walruses give birth on sea ice and that the sea creatures utilize ice as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf.
"[The] Arctic environment is changing extremely rapidly and it is time for the rest of the world to take notice and also to take action to address the root causes of climate change," the World Wildlife Fund said of the strange gathering of the walruses on an Alaska beach.
"It's another remarkable sign of the dramatic environmental conditions changing as the result of sea ice loss," Managing Director of the group's Arctic program, Margaret Williams said.
Though the 35,000 walruses can "haul out" onshore using their tusks, experts said that dry land is not the best habitat for these creatures.
Nevertheless, experts also revealed that the large number of walruses will soon enough migrate elsewhere since this is not the first time that they flocked on Alaskan shores, reported Washington Post.
Back in 2007, when sea ice failed to form, a number of walruses also gathered on Alaskan shores. Before, only as many as 100 walruses were spotted by experts, but the number has quickly escalated into thousands through the years.
"It becomes like a giant pig pile," Williams gushed. "You have all these animals that are normally distributed on a flat surface. When they lose their sea ice habitat and come ashore in places that are accessible - like flat, sandy beaches - they gather in large numbers. ... When they are disturbed it can cause stampedes in large numbers."
Scientists now fear that many walruses will be killed in a stampede. In 2009 they found 150 dead walruses after the gathering finally dispersed.
The WWF said that as much as 4 percent of sea ice is shrinking each decade since 1979.
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