December 5, 2023
This is what happens when you spend too much time down the rabbit hole that is the interwebs.
In 1959, the Soviet Union launched the icebreaker Moskva for use in the Russian arctic.
The ships was pretty on in years by 1984, but that’s when she made history. In December of 1984, a large pod of beluga whales — about 3,000 of them — were seen struggling for breathing room in small pools of open water in the ice-covered waters off the Chukchi Peninsula, which is due west of the Seward Peninsula in Alaska. Locals tried to keep the animals alive by feeding them with frozen fish and keeping the breathing holes open, but ice blocked their path to open water, and it soon became evident that the belugas would eventually perish unless they could be freed.
Enter the Moskva.
In February of 1985, the Moskva was called from the Bering Sea to break a channel through the ice pack and free the trapped herd. On 22 February, the icebreaker finally reached the belugas, but at first the whales refused to follow the ship to open water. However, when the crew began playing classical music through the ship’s loudspeakers, the whales finally followed Moskva to the unfrozen sea. In the end, it was estimated that about 2,000 whales escaped.
I was about to say “I love stories with a happy ending,” until I learned that some 500 of these majestic creatures were killed by local hunters.