Bowhead whales are endemic to the icy waters of the Arctic and prefer living in shallow waters near sea ice, filtering krill and tiny crustaceans called copepods for food. However, the Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth, and a recent study estimates that if this continues, then by 2100 the whales could lose up to 75% of the current area where their prime habitat now exists. Previous studies have looked at their past distributions over small geographic areas and used data from just the last 50 years or so. The new study looks at the whale’s distribution throughout its entire range, examining data going back nearly 12,000 years, from fossil evidence to whaling logbooks to more recent databases and published studies. The researchers wanted to “build a long-term baseline for this species that stretches back thousands of years so we can understand how resilient they actually will be to future climate change. Use the past as the key to the present,” study lead author Nick Freymueller, a doctoral candidate at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told Mongabay in a video call. Their modeling showed that, historically, bowheads whales (Balaena mysticetus) thrived in areas where summer sea ice covered 15-30% of the ocean surface. It also found that such bowhead habitat has been relatively stable for all of the Holocene, the last 11,700 years since the end of the last ice age. However, even under a moderate-emissions scenario, suitable bowhead habitat is expected…This article was originally published on Mongabay