Federal officials on Tuesday proposed designating an area more than twice the size of California as critical habitat to protect ringed seals, animals dependent on dwindling Arctic sea ice and snow for their survival.
About 350,000 square miles of icy marine territory in the Beaufort Sea off northern Alaska, the Chukchi Sea off northwestern Alaska and the northern Bering Sea off the state’s western coast would be designated as critical ringed-seal habitat under provisions of the Endangered Species Act, according to the rule proposed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service.
If the rule is adopted as proposed, the protected zone for ringed seals would be the nation’s most vast critical habitat. For now, the critical habitat designated in July for threatened loggerhead sea turtles — an estimated 317,544 square miles of beaches and marine waters in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, according to NOAA — is the largest in the nation.
Ringed seals, listed in December of 2012 as threatened, depend on sea ice and the snow atop it for survival and reproduction.
