This week, Alaska science writer Ned Rozell reflects on the remarkable northern legacy of Utqiagvik biologist Craig George, a world expert on bowhead whales who went missing in a rafting accident this month.
I was sad to learn recently that Craig George was missing and presumed dead when a raft he was floating upon hit a logjam in the Chulitna River on July 5. The Chulitna flows south from Broad Pass in the Alaska Range. George had run that river many times.
George, fellow biologist Leslie Pierce and I are at the ragged edge of sea ice that clings to the northern coast. Eiders, sea ducks almost as large as geese, bark in the cool air above the open water a few hundred yards ahead of us; the first loons to arrive this far north zip by on their way to summer.
Few people know as much about Balaena mysticetus as Craig George. He migrated to Barrow in the late 1970s and has studied the creatures since 1980, a time when scientists knew little about bowheads. The animals are so important for northern indigenous cultures that people evolved around using bowhead bodies for food, bowhead oil to light their lamps and bowhead bones to build shelters from the cold and constant wind.
So efficient is the bowhead’s foot of blubber insulation that bowhead skin temperatures are about equal to the surrounding frigid ocean, while their internal temperature remains about 92.7 degrees. Back on the Perch, it is a slow day for bowhead watching. Curtains of fog open and close above the open water through which the bowheads are swimming. George, Pierce and another watcher saw 18 whales yesterday, along with a polar bear that padded within a few dozen feet of the Perch before wandering off. We see neither whales nor bears at the Perch today .
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