Whaling Triggers Large CO2 Release

Whales, a class of animals that includes the largest creatures currently alive on our planet, are known in the scientific community for the ability they have to store carbon dioxide in their bodies. They apparently do so very efficiently, as a new study demonstrates that the last century of whaling has had a considerable impact on greenhouse-gas emissions. Statistics seem to indicate that as much as 100 million tons of carbon dioxide may have been released in the atmosphere by whaling crews killing these animals, the BBC News reports. The announcement was made in Portland, Oregon, at the 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Scientists in the United States, based at the University of Maine and led by expert, Dr. Andrew Pershing, called whales the forests of the oceans. They calculated mathematically the amount of carbon dioxide that there animals stored on average, as they grew. “Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon. And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that's removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere,” the expert told scientists at the gathering. For the new study, he worked closely with colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

While this happens more rarely today, in the early days of whaling, the blubber of these animals was used specifically for lamp oil. As the fat was burned, it released carbon dioxide directly into the atmosphere. “And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean. If they die where it's deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years,” Pershing said. He added that his investigation revealed a worrying fact. The amount of CO2 released from killing whales over the past 100 years is equivalent to the one emitted by burning 130,000 square kilometers of temperate forests, or by driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for a century.

The expert said that this massive amount paled in comparison to the billions of tons of carbon that other human activities produced. Fossil fuel-based power plants, vehicles, the transport and concrete industry, as well as other sources, release extremely large amounts of GHG into the air each year, which contribute to altering the global climate. “These [the whales] are huge and they are top predators, so unless they're fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die],” Pershing concluded.