Is Climate Change Really Causing Walruses to Jump Off Cliffs?

Netflix released a documentary series called "Our Planet" on April 5 that sits in the pantheon of great wildlife docs alongside BBC's "Planet Earth" and "Blue Planet." The new series stands out, though, because it explicitly shows how every ecosystem it highlights is being changed and threatened by climate change. And it includes one especially unsettling scene: Russian walruses tumble brutally down cliff sides to their deaths, one after another.

A Pacific walrus rests at the top of steep cliffs in Russia.

David Attenborough, the series' narrator, blames the incident on changes to the Arctic ecosystem that walruses inhabit. With sea ice receding year after year, he says, the walruses are forced to rest on crowded, tiny beaches. Those beaches are so overcrowded, he says, that some of the walruses scale cliffs for a bit of peace. But when the lumbering animals, unaccustomed to climbing or to heights, decide to return to the water, they wander right off the edge of the cliffs to their horrible deaths.

Read the story from LiveScience by Rafi Letzter - “Is Climate Change Really Causing Walruses to Jump Off Cliffs?”