|
|||
|
|
|||
|
See more photos in this slideshow. Go DeeperExplore Salmon Country Salmon Restoration |
Two hundred miles downstream, the slate-colored waters of Bristol Bay are edged with silver and spread wide to the southwestern horizon, where the Bering Sea lies beneath a scrim of cloud. The muddy flats along the shore here see some of the biggest tides on the planet; it is a place where ecological processes happen on a grand scale.
The larger-than-life scale of existence here can seem almost unreal at times — so much so that people remember the dates of particularly mesmerizing moments as they would the birth of a child or their wedding day. Pete Andrew is a Yup’ik who has been fishing Bristol Bay since 1978. He recalls one such moment from nearly two decades ago, down to the minute: May 27, 1989, at a quarter to five in the morning. “I was out halibut fishing, and the sun was rising when I came around Cape Constantine,” he says. “And up the entire west channel, it looked like rain.”
“It was [sockeye] smolt jumping, for — gee whiz — like seven miles wide and as far as I could see up the channel. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw in my life. It was as impressive as lions or anything wild as wild can be. It was just incredible.”
Those smolts were bound for sea, where they would spend several years maturing and growing large before returning to spawn. Each year, from May through the fall, runs of five species of salmon come pulsing back through Bristol Bay, bound for the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak Rivers. The fish use the Earth’s magnetic field to point them toward home, until they detect the distinctive scent of their native streams.
On their way back to home water, the salmon undergo a dramatic metamorphosis. As the salmon swim upstream, the carotenoids in their flesh — the pigmentation that gives sockeye meat its lustrous red color — migrate out to the skin, turning the fish bright red. During their month-long journey, the males develop a Quasimodo-like hump on their back, and their jaws transform into a massive overbite, while their gums recede to bare ferocious-looking fangs. At the end of their grueling journey back to their home streams, the fish will spawn and then die.
Even biologists who study salmon for a living speak with awe about the fishes’ determination when it’s finally time to spawn.
“Oh, yeah,” Woody says. “I’ve seen ’em where they’ve had their back eaten off by a bear, and they’re still ready to spawn.”
“Sometimes the males even get locked into a death battle,” she adds, with an almost giddy relish. “They get stuck together like elk.”
Even more astounding, though, is the role the fish play in the broader ecosystem. During the years salmon spend in the ocean, they grow fat on crustaceans and smaller fish fed by the abundant nutrients welling up along the continental shelf. When they return from the oceans to their home streams to spawn, their bodies become the vehicle that pumps life into the inland ecosystem.
“Every year, literally, they bring millions of pounds of nutrients from the ocean,” Woody says. Those nutrients feed algae in the streams, which forms the food base for the aquatic insects on which salmon and their prey depend. When bears feed on salmon, they often drag the carcasses far from the streams, distributing the nutrients even more widely. Nutrients from salmon carcasses can be found in grasses and trees far from any river.
“If you look at the [stream] tributaries as capillaries, salmon feed all of those little capillaries,” Woody says. “And that feeds the whole ecosystem.”
Gernot Wober and Mike Heatwole pile out of a helicopter that has set down on a rise overlooking the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak. Below them, eight drilling rigs are boring holes deep into the tundra. Somewhere off to the east, Team Woody works its way up a creek in pursuit of more salmon.
Wober and Heatwole’s company, the Pebble Limited Partnership, is on a quest to learn the true extent of the enormous copper, gold and molybdenum deposit that lies hidden beneath their feet. Because of the fragility of the tundra, the company uses helicopters, rather than punching roads into the area, and drills with custom-modified heli-transportable rigs. The drills have reached as deep as 6,000 feet underground, and the cores are helicoptered to the nearby village of Iliamna, where geologists are using them to piece together a map of the underground mineral deposits.
The Pebble Partnership, a joint venture between the Canadian company Northern Dynasty Mines and the worldwide mining giant Anglo American, has been drilling in earnest since 2002. The proposed Pebble mine gives every appearance of tapping into a bona fide mother lode, nearly 9 billion tons of ore that would likely be extracted with a combination open-pit and underground mine. “This is getting close to being the world’s largest copper deposit,” Wober says.
The project is still in “pre-feasibility” phase, and the partnership has yet to apply for all the permits it will need to move forward in developing the mine. Yet the company’s proposal is hardly a lark. The partnership has so far spent more than $300 million on exploration.
Wober rattles through a highly technical description of what’s happening here and then pauses to put it in personal terms: “This kind of project happens once in a lifetime.”
The possible development of this mine is raising huge questions — in Bristol Bay and throughout Alaska. Two hundred miles to the east and north, in Anchorage, Ed Fogels looks out of a 14th-floor conference room with commanding views of the Chugach and Alaska mountain ranges. Fogels is the director of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources’ Office of Project Management and Permitting, which is coordinating the application process for the mine.
Fogels, who is coordinating the process to either approve or reject the mine, is the first person to admit that the stakes are incredibly high. “These mines, they’re big disturbances,” he says. “To keep ’em tight is really difficult. And they can really screw up the environment if they’re done wrong.”
Nature picture credits: Photo © Bridget Besaw
Join The Nature Conservancy on