Whaling Season: A Year in the Life of an Arctic Whale Scientist

It's late April in Barrow, Alaska, which is about as far north in Alaska as you can get. The call comes in over the two-way radio - a crew has caught the first whale of the spring whaling season. Men, women, and teenagers jump on snow machines and drive out onto the ice to help harvest the whale, a tradition the Inupiaq Eskimos on Alaska's North Slope have followed for over two thousand years. John Craighead George, or Craig as he's called, heads out too. He is an Arctic whale scientist, and out on the ice with the whales and the whalers is just one of the places where an Arctic whale scientist works. He and his colleagues have an agreement with the Inupiat to study these whales, bowheads. He has studied them for nearly thirty years and the mysteries of these large creatures never fail to amaze him.