Whales on the wrong side of the world

A team of marine biologists was conducting a survey off the coast of Israel when they spotted it. At first they thought it was a sperm whale. But each time the animal surfaced, the more clearly they could see that it had the wrong anatomy. When they got back on land, they looked closely at the photographs they had taken and realized, to their shock, that it was a gray whale. This species is a common sight off the coast of California, but biologists had never seen one outside of the Pacific before.

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Then a new ice age began. Glaciers grew, sea levels dropped, and gray whales could no longer get across the Arctic. Sixty thousand years passed before the ice age ended with a sudden burst of warmth. And that’s when new waves of gray whales came into the Atlantic. The Arctic then cooled somewhat, closing the door once more.
Now we are warming the Arctic again by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If history is any guide, global warming in decades to come may open up the Arctic for Pacific gray whales, some of whom may wander off their regular migrations and end up in the Atlantic.

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Dittohead not! said:

Whales on the wrong side of the world

Gray whales, the sort seen off the west coast of the United States, are showing up once again in the Atlantic.

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joG said:

And so man toiled for millennia and helped the whale home after sixty thousand years in diaspora. It is a yet another splendid tale of great human endeavor!

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Dittohead not! said:

Yes, it is.
Of course, it was after humans hunted the whales to extinction in the Atlantic first.....

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