POTENT LOW FREQUENCY HYDROACOUSTIC WAVES FROM TWO EXPLOSIVE EARTHQUAKES HYPOCENTER UNDER THE ICE IN THE ARTIC OCEAN CAUSED 500 NARWHALES TO GET TRAPPED IN THE ICE

As many as 500 Arctic tusked whales face death as ice closes in.

EDMONTON - (Gazette at canada.com) As many as 500 tusked whales could be trapped in the ice north of Baffin Island - far more than originally estimated - making it one of the biggest strandings ever seen in the Arctic.

The narwhals were spotted on 15 November 2008  by Inuit hunters snowmobiling on sea ice in the area. Estimates at the time suggested about 200 whales got trapped after ice moved in or formed quickly, preventing them from reaching open water.

Federal Fisheries and Oceans officials gave the Inuit in Pond Inlet the go-ahead to start killing the whales last week when it appeared nothing short of an icebreaker could save the animals from eventually drowning.

Hunters from the village of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island discovered the animals trapped near Bylot Island, about 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) from Pond Inlet, on November 15, and checked on them periodically.

That harvest was supposed to have wrapped up by the weekend. The narwhals, however, keep surfacing, said several people who have been on the scene.

Inuit hunters resumed harvesting the narwhals with guns and harpoons Monday after spending most of Sunday trying to make the breathing holes larger.

The whales are trying to breathe through about 11 holes in the ice, most no bigger than a desk. In the panic to reach the holes, the larger adult whales have accidentally pushed young calves up onto the sea ice on at least two occasions.

"It's not a pretty sight," said Allan Hawkes, the Co-op store manager in Pond Inlet who is selling the whale blubber to other Arctic communities and the ivory tusks to international buyers.

"I used to work on a killing line at a slaughter plant down south, so I'm kind of used to this sort of thing.

"The one good thing about this is, nothing is getting wasted. And if you think about it, this is really no different from the way we harvest farm animals down south. Virtually everything will find its way to someone's table."

Since the number of whales appears to be far larger than originally estimated, some in the community are asking why Fisheries officials didn't fly to the scene earlier to evaluate the situation and study the options more closely.

Jayko Allooloo, president of the community's Hunters and Trappers Association, doubts it would have done any good; he thinks there were no other options.

"The open water is nearly 50 kilometers away and there is no icebreaker in the area," he said, adding that the hunters are in communication with Fisheries officials daily.

"The holes are getting smaller and smaller and there is not much time for them to live. It looks to me like the narwhals have been trapped there for some time, because the ones we are pulling out have only about an inch and a half of fat on them. Normally at this time of year, you would see three inches. That means they haven't eaten for some time."

Narwhal are found mostly in the Arctic circle, and are renowned for their extraordinarily long tusk, which is actually a twisted incisor tooth that projects from the left side of its upper jaw and can be up to three meters (10 feet) long.

"A couple of weeks ago, when the ice was still moving, there were quite a few narwhal seen out there in the open water," Jayko Allooloo, chairman of the Pond Inlet hunters and trappers organization, told public broadcaster CBC.

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The SEAQUAKE SOLUTION developed by the Deafwhale Society indicates that this large pod of narwhales lost their ability to navigate south to open water due to barotraumatic sinus injury suffered on 7 October 2008 during exposure to high intensity pressure waves (called T-Phase Waves by seismologists)  Emitted into the water from a nasty earthquake under the ice at Lat 79.75N Lon. 115.90W.  Earthquakes along the mid-Artic ridge radiate earthborne compressional and shear waves, which in turn excite the Artic acoustic channel. These waterborne arrivals, called T waves, have been observed about 300 km from the source and apparently enter the acoustic channel by scattering of vertical rays into nearly horizontal ones by the Arctic ice canopy above the source. The T waves are acoustically energetic (up to 400kJ), are of surprisingly long duration (up to 72s at its 8-dB down levels), have low-frequency content (peaks in the 5-15-Hz region), and have haystack spectra (4th power positive and negative dependence below and above the peak frequency, respectively).  These T-Phases were generated during two violent undersea earthquakes. The energy, not allowed to dissipate under the ice, traveled along  More specifically, the entrapment in the ice near Baffin Island was caused by the earthquake listed below:

Source: Global Centroid Moment Tensor Catalog Search

  Date: 2008/10/ 7   Centroid Time: 10: 0:49.7 GMT
  Lat=  79.75N  Lon= 115.90W
  Depth= 12.3   Half duration= 1.8
  Centroid time minus hypocenter time:  1.7
  Moment Tensor: Expo=24  4.650 -1.680 -2.970 1.160 0.955 -2.180 
  Mw = 5.7    mb = 5.8    Ms = 5.8   Scalar Moment = 4.86e+24
  Fault plane:  strike=213    dip=36   slip=83
  Fault plane:  strike=41    dip=54   slip=95

  Date: 2008/10/ 8   Centroid Time:  7:57:35.6 GMT
  Lat=  79.72N  Lon= 116.07W
  Depth= 12.7   Half duration= 1.1
  Centroid time minus hypocenter time:  1.6
  Moment Tensor: Expo=24  1.210 -0.563 -0.647 0.185 0.009 -0.573 
  Mw = 5.3    mb = 5.3    Ms = 5.3   Scalar Moment = 1.21e+24
  Fault plane:  strike=217    dip=42   slip=81
  Fault plane:  strike=49    dip=48   slip=98
 

The quake was also reported here.

In general, the seafloor danced rapidly during the earthquake, pushing and pulling at the water in a fashion to generate excessive changes in the hydrostatic pressure surrounding the area where the pod of pilot whales were feeding.  The quick fluctuations in pressure caused the volume of air inside the head sinuses of the whales to increase and decrease rapidly in response to the changing pressure resulting in a barotraumatic injury in the membranes that surround these sinuses.

Read the entire SEAQUAKE SOLUTION starting at: http://www.deafwhale.com

The whales use these sinuses to generate echonavigation signals and to read the returning echo, thus an injury of this nature would not only disrupt diving and feeding but also disable echonavigation.  A pod of earthquake-injured narwhals would not be able to dive again, nor be able to determine direction of their navigating signals.