Polar scientists have recruited an unlikely pair to aid their exploration of freezing Arctic waters: two wild white whales. The data gathered by these cetacean assistants promise to bolster scientists’ understanding of environmental conditions in the Arctic region, which climate modelers predict will be hard hit by global warming.
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White whales, also known as belugas, live primarily in the Arctic Ocean and adjoining seas. In winter, the 3-to-5-meter-long whales frequent waters topped by ice. “The whales enabled us to get data from an area that would be more or less impossible to explore any other way,” says oceanographer Ole Anders Nst of the Norwegian Polar Institute in Troms.