1. The Width of a Day
2. Threads

a thread from the whole story

The ones who cross freely

The border has never applied to the birds, the walrus, the whales or the water.

millionsThe auklets

The boulder slopes of the Diomedes hold one of the largest seabird colonies in the world.¹ Most of the birds are auklets: small, plump seabirds that nest in the cracks between rocks. Estimates put the crested and least auklets on Big Diomede alone at around three million.²

The Diomede dialect has words for each kind: akpalik for the least auklet, tayaq for the crested, and a word just for an auklet chick.³ People here catch them with nets, sometimes using live birds as decoys, and keep them with walrus meat in the meat cache until fall.³

In June 2016 fewer crested auklets than usual came back to Little Diomede, down 35 to 50 percent from the year before. Researchers found signs that the birds were stressed and short of food, and linked it to that year's unusually warm water.⁴

springThe walrus

Each spring, as the sea ice retreats, most female and young Pacific walrus migrate north through the strait into the Chukchi Sea; most adult males stay south in the Bering Sea.⁵ Calves are born on the way, in late April and May.⁶

On Diomede, walrus is a staple food, and no part of the animal is wasted. The village's own guide lists 13 ways to prepare it.³

AprilThe whales

Bowhead whales come north through the strait as the ice breaks up in spring, following leads of open water to feeding grounds in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Gray whales follow later.⁷ In years with less ice, the return trip in the fall has shifted later.⁷

alwaysAnd the sea itself

The Bering Strait is the only link between the Pacific and the Arctic Ocean. On average, its water flows north, from the Pacific into the Arctic: about 35 million cubic feet (a million cubic meters) every second, and that flow grew between 1990 and 2015.⁸ On some weeks the current briefly reverses.⁸

All of it crosses the date line, every day, without anyone checking.