Whaling fuelled industry for centuries, and the oceans still carry its carbon debt
Carvings on the Bangudae rocks in Korea, possibly from 6000 BC, appear to show people hunting small whales. The first records of a true commercial trade come much later, from the Basque coasts of Spain and France in 1026. From there, the hunt spread across the North Atlantic and eventually to every ocean.
Subsistence whaling is ancient. Inuit and other northern peoples caught small cetaceans by at least 3000 BC, and a 2026 study found that Indigenous communities in southern Brazil pursued baleen whales at least 5,000 years ago. The Basques were the first to hunt commercially and led the trade for five centuries. Organised fleets appeared in the seventeenth century, rival national industries grew through the eighteenth and nineteenth, and demand for whale oil, called train oil, kept pushing techniques forward. The twentieth century added factory ships, explosive harpoons and new markets for margarine and meat. Annual catches topped 50,000 animals before the 1930s were out.
Such pressure pushed several species close to extinction. Countries began cooperating on rules in 1931, leading to a 1946 convention and the International Whaling Commission, which sets quotas for 13 great whale species. On 23 July 1982 the commission voted for a moratorium on commercial hunting of great whales, starting with the 1985–86 season. Iceland, Japan and Norway still hunt commercially, while several Indigenous and island communities continue smaller traditional hunts.
Official numbers were not always honest. In 1994 it emerged that the Soviet Union had drastically underreported its catch: between 1948 and 1973 it took 48,477 humpbacks while declaring only 2,710. The commission had suspected something but felt unable to challenge a sovereign state, and it had to revise four decades of records.
Today, other human activities pose large threats too. The World Wide Fund for Nature attributes 90 percent of human-caused deaths among northern right whales to collisions with ships, and accidental capture in fishing gear kills more whales than hunting. Ship noise overlaps the frequencies many whales use. Whales also matter for climate: their droppings fertilise surface waters, and their sunken carcasses carry carbon to the seabed. Researchers estimate that baleen whales now store about 9.1 million fewer tons of carbon than before industrial whaling began.
Source: Whaling
