THE WHALES OF FISHING CREEK

Pliocene Whale Watching

Marquetta Dickens and I head to my favorite fossil hunting spot on Fishing Creek just north of Princeville. We meet my fossil-hunting friend Megan and put on some chest waders, even though the water is quite low from lack of rain.

Just beneath the sandy creek bottom is an exposure of the Yorktown Formation, where the shards of whale ribs and big vertebrae are plentiful.

Here I’ve dug up five-inch teeth from an Otodus megalodon, a megatooth shark that grew up to 60 feet long — longer than a Greyhound bus — and, with a maw full of teeth the size of an adult hand, fed on whales. It’s possible that a giant shark killed and took apart a whale here millions of years ago. A Pliocene crime scene. 

We use a metal rod to probe for gravel and bone in the layer. When we find it, we dig big scoops of green clay and sift it in homemade fossil screens. We shake the screens in the water, until the old marine mud dissolves, and only rocks and shards of bone rattle in our sifters. And some sharks’ teeth. 

Marquetta has the eye. She finds several tiger shark teeth in her first few screens. But the hunting is slow. We dig a few holes and crouch in them, feeling for bones protruding from their edges. This goes on for an hour or two. Until Megan feels something protruding from the mud near the bank.  

“I think I found a whale vertebra,” she blurts out.

Return of the Sea

Paleoclimatologists — scientists who study Earth’s prehistoric climates—are fascinated and perplexed by the Pliocene. They can reconstruct this ancient climate and predict the future by studying fossil zooplankton.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are closely linked with ocean acidity, which impacts the boron atoms in the tiny zooplankton’s skeleton. By analyzing the boron composition of Pliocene and ice-aged Pleistocene zooplankton in ancient seafloor sediment and comparing it to carbon dioxide trapped in Antarctic ice core samples from the same time period, scientists determined atmospheric carbon levels peaked at around 380 to 420 parts per million in the Mid-Pliocene; in May 2022, levels reached 421 ppm. 

Global temperature increases have been shown to lag behind rising atmospheric carbon levels, so scientists see the hot Mid-Pliocene Warm Period as an imperfect analogue for where our climate and sea levels are headed beyond the end of the century as climate warming catches up with our altered atmosphere. 

Sea levels will rise more than 3 feet beyond the end of the 21st century if greenhouse emissions are not reduced and removed from the atmosphere. Report after report shows that if the Greenland ice sheet melts entirely it could trigger a 20-foot sea level rise in the next 100 to 200 years. The collapse of the Antarctic ice sheets could raise sea levels by over 100 feet. One day the ocean could return to eastern North Carolina. 

Dr. Rick Luettich, a leading expert on hurricanes and storm surge, and director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Center for Natural Hazards Resilience says that planning has fixated on 2100 for too long, and it’s time to start thinking about 2150 or 2200, when a 20-foot rise is very real.

“It's just a matter of when, more than it's a matter of if,” he said.

According to Dr. Stanley Riggs, the marine geologist retired from East Carolina University, if seas rise only 20 to 25 feet, the Atlantic Ocean would re-occupy the Suffolk Shoreline — the shoreline produced during the last interglacial episode, 125,000 years ago — about 40 miles east of Edgecombe County. The Suffolk Shoreline stretched north from near Morehead City, to Washington, Edenton and the Virginia border.

“The Pamlico River Estuary would drown up the Tar River valley, possibly into the vicinity of Tarboro,” said Riggs. 

Luettich says that because the ocean traps heat and carbon dioxide more efficiently than the atmosphere, even if we stop burning fossil fuels and remove carbon from the atmosphere, we can expect to have an abnormally warm ocean, rising seas and more destructive storms for centuries to come.

“The ocean has a much longer memory,” he said.

Plankton-powered Reciprocity

The seas are the largest carbon stores on Earth, crucial to tempering climate change. Oceans absorb and cycle 93% of the planet’s greenhouse gasses, up to 35% of which comes from the atmosphere. Much of it ends up trapped in the sea floor sediment, which, if undisturbed, can indefinitely sequester vast amounts of carbon across millions of years.

Drifting en masse at the ocean surface, phytoplankton transform sunlight, seawater nutrients, and atmospheric carbon dioxide into living tissue. Worldwide, they produce about half of the atmospheric oxygen on earth, while holding 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s equivalent to 40% of annual greenhouse emissions, or “the amount of carbon dioxide captured by 1.70 trillion trees — four Amazon forests’ worth,” according to the International Monetary Fund. 

When phytoplankton die, their remains and the carbon they’ve consumed, along with other bits of organic debris, rain down on the seafloor and become sediment. Their carbon also travels up the food chain. Larger zooplankton, such as krill, also eat phytoplankton. And then mammoth baleen whales consume mass quantities of krill. 

As they swim and feed, whales filter the zooplankton and sequester carbon in their bodies. Other species, like sperm whales, dive deep for squid. When whales defecate at the surface they fertilize the water column with nutritious iron, phosphorus and nitrogen. The whales poop. The phytoplankton bloom. Carbon is captured again, and the cycles are sustained. This is the biological carbon pump, or “whale pump.”

These whales, made of sunlight and carbon dioxide passed on by phytoplankton through a great chain of life, can live for centuries. And they trap carbon in their bodies their entire lives. 

Off the coast of Alaska live 200-year-old bowhead whales. They were born before the 1850s — the decade Eunice Foote discovered that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could warm the planet. A female bowhead whale, estimated to be 133 years old, was found with a pre-industrial stone harpoon point stuck in her blubber. 

When whales die, they fall thousands of feet to the sea floor. With each “whale fall” their remains sustain food webs alien to us. In deep space darkness, their bodies are transformed into an ecosystem for scavengers like worms and octopi that cannot see light and survive only on whale carcasses. If a whale carcass is quickly buried in sediment, its bones can fossilize. These processes lock their carbon away for millennia.

Each great whale can store an estimated equivalent of 33 tons of carbon dioxide. But according to a frequently cited 2010 study by Dr. Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine, a single century of whaling removed 23 million tons of carbon from the sea.

“Long before we built offshore rigs for fossil oil and gas, we mined our seas for whales,” writes Alice Bell in her book, Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis. “[Whales] remind us that humans' problematic relationship with energy is bigger than simply fossil fuels.”

Cotton, Slavery and Whaling

Industrial whaling was genocide. So was chattel slavery. Like whales, Princeville’s African ancestors were hunted by white men, their bodies and labor were transmuted into wealth, which supercharged economies and empires. Sugar slavery in the Caribbean bankrolled Britain's American colonies, where slave labor on plantations, like the ones in Edgecombe County, made cotton king.

The cotton boom gave rise to industrial factories necessitating the use of the steam engine, which sparked a new craving for coal. Whale oil lit the factories and lubricated their coal-powered machines which spun cotton into thread and belched carbon dioxide into the sky. Industrial Revolutions were born. And from the seeds of cotton, slavery and the genocide of people and nature for the sake of wealth, the climate crisis bloomed. 

The resulting wounds to people and the planet have not healed. 

Aided by fossil fuel-powered factory ships that could dismember a whale while the crew kept hunting, we killed an estimated three million whales in the 20^th century alone, which reduced baleen whale populations globally by two-thirds. 

For 400 years, around 12.5 million African men, women and children were enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the Americas. At least 2 million perished at sea during the middle passage. 

Gray whales, which frequented the North Carolina coast for millions of years, “have been missing from the Atlantic Ocean since the end of the transatlantic slave trade,” writes queer Black poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. “Gray whales are world shapers. The only large whale to feed on sediment on the bottom of the ocean, they leave massive trails on the underwater surface of the Earth. They dig up nutrients that feed whole ecosystems.”

"I wonder if the toxicity of the slave trade and its impact on the ocean have been under-reported. Lucille Clifton says the “Atlantic is a sea of bones.” What is the half-life of the transubstantiation of life into servitude? Does it ever dissolve? And the bones of those captives who freed themselves, or left their bodies and were subsequently thrown overboard became…what? Sediment. Filtered ultimately into the baleen of the Atlantic gray whale, right? So there is actually a digestive truth to the idea that the ancestors we lost in the transatlantic slave trade became whales,” wrote Gumbs.

Save the Whales, Slow Climate Change

Scientists have found that populations of krill, the baleen whales’ favorite zooplankton snack, have decreased, possibly as a result of industrial whaling. 

This “krill paradox” baffles scientists like Stanford University’s Dr. Matthew Savoca. When a major predator declines in an ecosystem, the population of its prey should increase. But krill have not. 

“The [krill] declines occurred most steeply in regions where the most whales were removed,” Savoca said. Regions like the Southern Ocean — the open sea encircling Antarctica — far away from where most upwelling and productivity occurs along the coasts. (Scientists call this transfer of nutrients to nutrient-poor polar waters where whales give birth the “whale conveyor belt”).

Savoca suspects climate change is at play. But he says the krill decline was documented 50 years ago, before modern impacts of climate change could affect global krill populations. He is confident that the slaughter of baleen whales decreased the numbers of krill. Other studies make similar conclusions about the loss of toothed sperm whales. 

“There's nothing else out there that can supply iron to the open ocean,” he says.

Understanding the great whale’s role in carbon capture is still in its infancy. There is so much that we just don’t know. But it’s clear that the more whales swimming the seas, the more phytoplankton they nurture and carbon they absorb. 

According to the IMF, banning all commercial whaling and restoring their populations to pre-whaling numbers — an increase from 1.3 million today to around 4 or 5 million — would dramatically increase plankton populations. Even a 1% boost in phytoplankton productivity would capture an extra hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually, “equivalent to the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees,” the IMF says.

These restored whale populations could remove around 1.7 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually. Blue whale falls would sequester 160,000 tons of carbon dioxide alone. Protecting and restoring eight key species of baleen whales would store 8.7 million tons of carbon “equivalent to 110,000 hectares of forest or an area the size of the Rocky Mountain National Park,” according to the Pershing study. 

Habitat alteration or destruction is the greatest threat to biodiversity. The Climate Risk Index of Biodiversity shows that 90% of marine species are at high risk of extinction across 85% of habitats — but particularly in nearshore habitats — if global temperatures break 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. But the effects of climate change on whales is unclear. 

Scientists caution that modern climate changes, including an ice-free Arctic, could allow more sunlight to penetrate surface waters and increase the mixing of nutrients. This would benefit great whales. 

In other regions, warmer water temperatures and an uptick in dissolved carbon dioxide acidify the oceans. That cycle could reduce the nutrient productivity that begins with phytoplankton, and thus threaten giant whales. Large species extinctions, including the decline in whale diversity at the end of the Pliocene worries scientists about what climate change could mean for giant modern marine creatures.

Scientists are concerned that modern zooplankton, like their ancestors that were unable to adapt to climate change, could go extinct, especially in the southern ocean. Such a mass die-off could possibly reduce the transfer of carbon to the deep sea, and threaten biodiversity, ocean food webs, and ecosystems “for millions of years to come.” The loss of whales could contribute to increased carbon in our atmosphere and increased climate warming.

Pyenson believes we are heading toward Mid-Pliocene-level global temperatures. But he isn’t very concerned about climate change driving whales extinct, since these mammals first appeared and thrived in even hotter times 50 million years ago.

“[Humans] may or may not make it as long as whales do. I think that the large whales will probably outlive us,” said Pyenson.

But human activities that unintentionally kill whales pose a serious danger. 

Warming seas are already driving zooplankton to migrate to cooler waters. North Atlantic Right whales follow them, where they can become entangled in the millions of lobster and crab trap lines in New England and Canadian waters. This rope wraps around their bodies and mouths preventing feeding. The whales can suffer in pain for months as they slowly die of starvation. Only around 330 North Atlantic right whales remain; their habitat includes coastal North Carolina.

Ropeless lobster traps operated by acoustics — often called “on-demand” traps — already exist and could drastically reduce whale deaths from entanglements, but they are expensive. Congressional legislation has been introduced to offer tax credits to help lobster fishers adapt to traps with weaker ropes that allow whales to break free. 

Congress has yet to vote on other bills that would fund development of ropeless gear.

Miles-long fishing drift nets sweep whales and dolphins from the open ocean, as do bottom trawling nets that scrape marine life from the seafloor. Deep sea noise pollution from sonar used by oil companies and the U.S. Navy stresses marine mammals to the point in which they strand themselves. 

The Atlantic Coast, including North Carolina, is a major avenue for shipping. Boat strikes from large cargo ships often carrying crude oil and other fossil fuels, kill and maim whales. Eliminating these whale-killing oil tankers and sonar is yet another reason to transition our economies from fossil fuels to clean renewable energy, so that whales and other marine mammals can live their carbon-sequestering lives in peace.

Protecting Biodiversity

With the help of endangered species acts and Marine Protected Areas along our coastlines, endangered humpbacks, blue and fin whales are making a comeback.

Humpbacks, the singing giants that launched the Save the Whales movement, are no longer considered endangered on the Atlantic Coast, including North Carolina.

New international agreements, like the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBJN) treaty drafted by the United Nations, can help safeguard marine biodiversity in international waters far from shore. Encouraging biodiversity and preserving larger marine species — like giant baleen whales and even apex predators like the great white shark — and the largest individuals within species is also crucial to maintaining healthy ecosystems that sequester carbon. The ecological crisis and climate crisis are one crisis.  

Scientists are calling for a Global Deal for Nature — or “30x30” plan — aimed to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030, which will reduce extinction threats and maintain carbon sequestering species and ecosystems. Currently only 2% of oceans are fully protected marine reserves, which are much more effective than other marine conservation methods like fisheries management. Around 40% on average should be designated as full reserves to protect biodiversity, avoid extinctions, and “adverse evolution,” according to scientists. 

The IMF estimates that it could cost only $13 USD per person to restore global whale populations to pre-industrial numbers. Restoration of marine species and marine reserves would likely benefit whale tourism and subsistence fishing in coastal communities. 

The IPCC is clear that the best climate solutions are the ones that work with nature and not against it. These solutions will only work if they are created, enacted and managed in collaboration with local communities that provide local benefits, particularly with Indigenous people who have been subsistence whaling for thousands of years, and for whom co-existing with whales and managing their habitats is a way of life. 

Not taking climate action and allowing a global temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius could cost the global economy $178 trillion according to reporting by Grist. But the estimated costs for a GDN across half the planet could only be $100 billion a year. The 2023 budget for the US military (one of the greatest sources of greenhouse emissions) will surpass $800 billion alone. Funding a GDN is practical when the bill is divided across countries, and “the cheapest and fastest alternative for addressing climate change” not dependent on carbon removal technologies that are difficult to scale. 

But, scientists say, ecosystem-based climate solutions are not a substitute for decarbonizing our economies and rapidly shifting to renewable energy.

Back to the Pliocene

When I was a child, I wanted to be a marine biologist or a paleontologist when I grew up. I became a journalist instead. As the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the planet in 2020, I found time to explore those passions. My human interactions decreased and my sense of time eroded. I had to find my footing. So, armed with a shovel and a homemade sifter, my twin brother and I reconnected with the land by hunting for fossil shark teeth in the rivers and creeks of eastern North Carolina. 

Fossil hunting helps me cope with my climate emotions and transform them into action. It’s a form of meditation and deep listening, a way to intimately know your bioregion — a region defined not by human place-names and boundaries, but by characteristics of the natural environment. My bioregion also includes past iterations of the land and its extinct inhabitants.

“Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself — its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again,” writes Indigenous author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, recounting an Indigenous Anishinaabe creation story where the past, the present, and the future exist at once. 

“Creation, then, is an ongoing process,” she concludes, “and the story is not history alone — it is also prophecy.”

Sometimes the present and the past, my imagination and reality bleed together when I fossil hunt. I get the feeling I’m being watched, but not by a human. 

When I find a whale bone I’ll hold it in my hands and close my eyes in enchantment. I imagine its life in the ancient sea. No humans, only starlight. Weightless in an expanse so vast, so black. So unknown. The horizon blurs with the night sky, the edges of the Earth fade, and the whales are suspended somewhere between the sea and star-filled space. 

There in the creek, standing on the Pliocene seafloor, a wave of vertigo hits me. I am time traveling. Slowly, softly, tumbling through the epochs of eastern North Carolina.

I splash down in the sea. Is it the Pliocene or the future? I sink through beams of moonlight, past a pod of extinct whales. I land on the ocean floor in a bed of bones. I open my eyes and I’m lying in a cotton field. Suddenly I’m transported back to my body in the creek.

Whales reveal that climate solutions are all around us, and that our ecological-climate crisis, racial injustice and inequity are one crisis. Colonialism created and drove climate change, in part through genocide on Black, brown and Indigenous people, and on species essential to carbon capture — from the largest whales to the tiniest plankton responsible for our very breath. 

Communities of color and Indigenous people, long exploited by colonialism, are least responsible for climate change yet they are the first and most disproportionately harmed by our warming planet. 

Like the people of Princeville who make their stand at the edge of the Tar River and the unknown. Where the bones of their ancestors and the bones of old whales are cradled in the coastal plain — the bottom of an old sea.

Note: This series is not available for republishing under Creative Commons.

Special thanks to Dr. Nathan Hall at the UNC Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, N.C. for helping me photograph plankton; to Captain Ryan and Captain Delaney at Pacific Offshore Expeditions in Newport Beach, California for helping me find whales to safely and ethically photograph; to Lisa Sorg for her early editing and enthusiasm for this story; to J.R. Hicks for sharing his love of looking for old things in Edgecombe County creeks; and to my brother and other fossil hunting friends.

Justin Cook is a photographer, journalist and artist based in Durham, North Carolina. His long-term photographic essays and narrative journalism projects tell stories about resilience in communities living along the edges in America, often by focusing on environmental issues and climate change. He believes storytelling that not only shines light on these issues, but also investigates solutions is crucial to social change.

His work has been funded by The Pulitzer Center Connected Coastlines Initiative, The North Carolina Arts Council, The Puffin Foundation, and honored by POYi, The Society of Professional Journalists, and American Photography. His clients include Duke University, The Guardian, The Marshall Project, The National Audubon Society, National Geographic, The New York Times, The Trace, The Washington Post, and others.