Whales Are Climate’s Secret Architects
Every dive, every plume, every death in the deep steadies our climate. This is how whales keep the world alive.
Whales are more than ocean giants. They fertilise plankton, move nutrients across entire seas, and lock carbon away for centuries when they die. Industrial whaling broke this planetary system, but recovery has already begun. This piece blends science and personal encounters to show how whales act as climate’s secret architects, and why protecting them may be one of the most powerful climate solutions we have.
It was the summer of 2010, and the Atlantic was cold enough to sting. Salt on my lips, mask fogging, the hiss of my own breath loud in my ears. I floated in silence between Tenerife and La Gomera, the ocean stretching deep and endless below.
Then they appeared.
A family of pilot whales, slipping out of the blue like shadows. Two broke away and swam toward me. I forced myself to stay still. My chest ached with held breath. Then, impossibly close, one turned just enough for its eye to meet mine.
Time bent. The water muffled everything except that gaze. Bright, unblinking, patient. For a moment it felt as if the ocean itself had paused, waiting for me to understand.
That moment was caught on film. Here is the encounter as it happened.
I have seen many whales since. Humpbacks breaching gracefully off Vancouver. Orcas in Monterey Bay tossing a bird between them for an hour, passing it back and forth like a game. A pilot whale carrying her dead calf in her mouth, unwilling to let go. Each moment has stayed with me. Yet that first eye contact remains the anchor. That moment felt like being acknowledged by the ocean itself
The Gardeners of the Sea
Whales are not simply inhabitants of the ocean. They are gardeners. Every dive, every breath, every plume of waste moves nutrients in ways that shape life itself.
I remember the first time I saw a whale’s faeces on a whale watching trip. A brown plume trailed behind, suspended in the water like smoke. At the time it looked like little more than a mess. Only later, when I began working at Whale and Dolphin Conservation, where I lead the campaigns against commercial whaling and captivity, did I learn what it truly was. Fertiliser. A gift to the plankton floating in the sunlit layer of the sea.
Marine ecologist Joe Roman calculated that in the Gulf of Maine, whales and seals once released over 23,000 tonnes of nitrogen per year. That’s more than all the rivers flowing into the Gulf combined. Rivers are the ocean’s traditional fertiliser pipelines, carrying nutrients from land into coastal waters where plankton blooms begin. To realise that whales alone outpaced that entire system is staggering. Imagine thousands of fertiliser trucks tipping their load into the sea each year, only these trucks swam.
Many whales feed in the dark, cold depths and return to the surface to breathe. There, they release plumes rich with nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron. Unlike the dense pellets of smaller animals that sink quickly, whale faeces spreads as a buoyant cloud, staying near the light where phytoplankton can use it. In the Southern Ocean, sperm whale plumes carry iron so concentrated that it is like tipping manure into a starving field.
That fertiliser sparks phytoplankton blooms, vast, swirling fields of microscopic plants in the sunlit ocean. These blooms are not just food. They are forests of the sea, drawing carbon out of the sky, feeding krill and fish, and rippling upward to sustain seabirds, seals, and us.
Whalers once claimed whales stole our fish. The evidence shows the opposite. Seas with more whales have more plankton. More plankton mean more forage fish. More forage fish mean healthier seas.
Whales do not take away. They multiply.
The Great Conveyor
The whale pump works vertically. The whale conveyor works horizontally.
Every year, humpbacks, fins and blues embark on migrations that span oceans. They gorge on krill in polar seas, then travel thousands of miles to breed in the tropics. Along the way they shed skin, release urine and leave trails of nutrients in waters that would otherwise remain barren.
Andrew Pershing and colleagues modelled what the ocean looked like before industrial whaling. In the Gulf of California, pre-whaling numbers of blue whales could have increased phytoplankton growth by 15% every year. That is the oceanic equivalent of planting tens of thousands of hectares of forest in a desert.
Whales fertilise the ocean in life, in motion, in breath. Yet their greatest gift often comes at the end.
If you’ve read this far, you know whales are more than ocean giants, they are climate’s secret architects. The next part of this piece goes deeper: grief, collapse and the return of the giants. This work is made possible by Ocean Rising’s paid subscribers and Founding Members. You can join them, and unlock the full article today, with a free 7-day trial.
Life After Death
Whales give even in death.
I have seen grief among whales with my own eyes. A pilot whale holding a dead calf in its mouth, refusing to let go. That devotion reveals something deep about them, but it also points to what happens when a whale finally succumbs.
When a giant dies and sinks, its body becomes a ‘whale fall’. Dozens of tonnes of carbon and tissue descend into darkness. On the seafloor, sharks arrive first, then hagfish, then stranger creatures. Bone-eating worms. Mussels that drink oil. Entire communities found nowhere else. More than two hundred species may thrive on a single carcass.
Roman and colleagues found that a whale fall can deliver up to 160 tonnes of carbon to the abyss, where it remains for centuries. That is the weight of about 25 African elephants, all stored as carbon in the deep ocean. Each fall can also sustain unique ecosystems for 50 to 100 years.
During a 2019 expedition, researchers discovered a whale fall at 10,623 feet below the surface near Davidson Seamount in NOAA's Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
The Return
Industrial whaling was not only an ecological tragedy but a climate one. By killing millions of whales, we broke the machinery that kept the seas in balance. The pumps slowed, the great conveyor stalled, and the steady rain of whale falls to the deep ocean all but stopped. Nutrients no longer circulated at the same scale. Carbon that should have been buried for centuries was instead burned, boiled, or left unsequestered. The ocean’s natural climate system faltered.
Now, humpbacks sing again in the North Atlantic. Blue whales are returning to California and Iceland. Each year of recovery brings more than beauty. This is what drives my work at Whale and Dolphin Conservation. I spend my days tracking whaling ships, challenging governments and standing alongside local campaigners in places like Iceland, Norway, Japan and the Faroes. Each time a harpoon is stopped, I know we have spared not just a whale, but a climate ally.
Marine ecologist Trish Lavery has shown that restoring whales to pre-whaling numbers could help bury hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon every year. That is as much as the forests of an entire small country absorb annually. Not through machines. Not through geoengineering. Simply through life.
The International Monetary Fund went further, estimating that a full recovery of great whales could help capture 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon annually. That is comparable to the annual emissions of Brazil.
It is staggering to think that letting whales live could rival the climate impact of an industrial superpower.
Some economists estimate that each whale is worth millions of dollars for the carbon it helps capture. That figure may catch attention, but it misses the point. Whales are not numbers on a balance sheet. They are living systems, and their survival is bound to ours.
Culture and Myth
For as long as we have told stories, whales have appeared in them. Leviathans in scripture. Sea monsters on maps. Totems in coastal cultures.
In whalers’ logbooks from the nineteenth century, whales were reduced to tallies, ‘fish’ to be boiled into oil. In Melville’s Moby-Dick, they became monsters. In Pacific and Arctic traditions, they were protectors and ancestors. Each story reveals more about us than them.
In the Faroe Islands, pilot whales are still driven ashore in hunts known as the grindadráp. To many Faroese, this is tradition and food security. To outsiders, it is slaughter. The clash reveals how deeply whales are woven into identity, economy and survival.
Among the Makah people of the Pacific Northwest, whaling was once sacred, performed with rituals and songs that honoured the animal’s spirit. Such practices show a relationship of reciprocity very different from the industrial killing that followed.
Across cultures, whales have always been seen as forces that hold balance between survival and reverence, abundance and loss. Science now shows that same balance extends to the climate itself. The same animals once honoured in myth are now proven by data to steady the seas.
We built economies on their bodies, then nearly erased them. Today, we gather on boats with cameras raised, straining for a glimpse of flukes and spouts. We still sense they are more than animals. They are mirrors, reflecting our relationship with the sea. When we hunted them, we consumed. When we protect them, we begin to heal.
Calm, Clarity
Every whale is a vault of carbon. A single great whale holds around 33 tonnes in its body, equivalent to thousands of trees. Every dive, every plume, every fall to the abyss is a quiet act of climate resilience. They steady the seas in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
I think back to that first pilot whale, eye to eye and the mother mourning its calf, carrying it mouth to mouth. To the humpback fluke cracking the surface like a gunshot.
Whales give me a rare sense of calm. Whales make me pause, breathe, and feel connected to something far bigger than myself.
Somewhere, right now, a whale is sinking into darkness. Its body becomes an island of life. Its carbon is sealed away for centuries.
We will never see it. We will never hear it. Yet it changes the world… just as that gaze in 2010 changed mine.
What You Can Do
The story of whales and climate is still being written. The next decade will decide whether recovery continues or stalls. Industrial whaling showed how quickly balance can collapse. Protecting whales now can help tip it back.
That is the work I dedicate my life to at Whale and Dolphin Conservation.
If this piece has moved you, I would encourage you to learn more, share what you’ve read, and get involved in protecting whales and dolphins. On the website you can find resources, current campaigns, and ways to support this work directly.
Every voice adds weight. Every action helps give whales the chance to keep playing their part in stabilising the ocean, the climate and ultimately, our future.
References
Roman, J. & McCarthy, J. J. (2010). The Whale Pump: Marine mammals enhance primary productivity in a coastal basin. PLoS ONE, 5(10).
Roman, J., Estes, J. A., Morissette, L., Smith, C., Costa, D., McCarthy, J., Nation, J. B., Nicol, S., Pershing, A. J., & Smetacek, V. (2014). Whales as marine ecosystem engineers. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 12(7), 377–385.
Pershing, A. J., Christensen, L. B., Record, N. R., Sherwood, G. D., & Stetson, P. B. (2010). The impact of whaling on the ocean carbon cycle. PLoS ONE, 5(8).
Branch, T. A. & Williams, T. M. (2006). Whales, whaling, and ocean ecosystems. University of California Press.
Lavery, T. J., Roudnew, B., Seymour, J., & Mitchell, J. G. (2014). Iron defecation by sperm whales stimulates carbon export in the Southern Ocean. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 281(1787).
International Monetary Fund (2019). Nature’s Solution to Climate Change. Finance & Development, 56(4).
I look forward to your posts, Luke. I am grateful for your insights and passion. Thank you!