whaling

Scientists around the world will now share and analyse these precious mud samples to work out how human activity - including a century of industrial whaling - affected Antarctica and the rest of our planet.

Those two events helped spark the first Earth Day, in 1970, and the shutdown of America’s last whaling station in 1971.

It is estimated that 2.9 million whales were killed by the whaling industry in the 20th Century alone.

She said the increase could be due to a number of reasons, including that whale populations are recovering following the end of commercial whaling in the 1980s.

Like bowhead and right whales, these were also almost wiped out by whaling.