How a 200-year-old whale could hold the clues to beating cancer

Fluke of a submerging bowhead whale, Canada, Nunavut, Bylot Island, Sirmilik National Park

From ArcticToday by Mary McAuliffe

 
The bowhead whale is, by every biological calculation, the perfect breeding ground for cancer.
It weighs over 80,000 kilograms and lives for more than 200 years — more cells, more divisions, more time for genetic damage to accumulate than almost any other creature on Earth.
Yet, it is one of the least cancer-prone animals alive.
Scientists can finally explain why.
Researchers at the University of Rochester identified a DNA-repair protein called CIRBP that operates at levels 100 times higher in bowhead cells than in any other mammal, including humans, according to their study published in Nature.

The bowhead whale is an Arctic specialist, spending its entire life in and around sea ice in the waters of northern Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Greenland.
Iñupiat hunters have long maintained that bowhead whales live two human lifetimes.
That claim had been met with skepticism by Western science until Victorian-era harpoon points were found embedded in the bodies of recently caught whales, a pattern that could not be explained unless those animals had survived encounters with 19th-century hunters and gone on to live another century.

Subsequent research confirmed a maximum lifespan of more than 200 years, making the bowhead the longest-lived mammal on Earth by a significant margin.

What the new research reveals is that the bowhead’s secret is not that it kills off damaged cells faster than other animals; it repairs them better.
Rather than relying on more tumor-suppressor genes to destroy cells that go wrong, the bowhead’s cells simply make far fewer errors in the first place, catching and correcting DNA breaks before they can accumulate into the kind of damage that causes cancer.
And in a finding with striking implications for human medicine, the key protein driving this repair mechanism also appears to work in human cells.
That raises the possibility that what keeps a whale healthy for two centuries could eventually help point researchers toward developing treatments for human cancer and age-related disease.

“By studying a mammal that is capable of maintaining its health and avoiding death from cancer for more than two centuries, we are offered a unique glimpse behind the curtain of a global evolutionary experiment,” the researchers wrote.
Key FindingsPeto’s Paradox, solved: Large, long-lived animals should get far more cancer than small ones, simply because they have more cells dividing over more years.
This mismatch between predicted and actual cancer rates is known as Peto’s Paradox.
The bowhead whale is the most extreme example, and this study offers the clearest answer yet to how evolution solved the problem: not by building more cancer defenses, but by building better DNA repair.
The CIRBP protein — present at 100 times normal levels: Researchers found that a cold-triggerable RNA-binding protein called CIRBP manifests at roughly 100 times higher concentrations in bowhead whale cells compared to other mammals.
This protein supercharges the repair of double-strand DNA breaks, one of the most dangerous forms of genetic damage and a primary driver of cancer when left unrepaired.
Repair, not destroy: Most cancer research focuses on tumor suppressor genes that trigger cell death when something goes wrong.
Bowhead cells take a different approach; they repair damaged DNA rather than eliminating the cell entirely.
The researchers describe this as a “repair-not-eliminate” strategy and suggest it may be the key to maintaining healthy tissue over an extraordinarily long lifespan.
It works in human cells too: In a critical finding for medical research, bowhead CIRBP was shown to improve DNA repair efficiency and reduce mutation rates in human cells in laboratory experiments.
This suggests the mechanism is not unique to whales.
Rather, the underlying biology is shared with humans, meaning it could in principle be harnessed therapeutically to slow aging and reduce cancer risk.
Indigenous knowledge confirmed (again): Iñupiat hunters have long maintained that bowhead whales live two human lifetimes.
That claim was validated when Victorian-era harpoon fragments dating from the 1800s were found embedded in whales caught in the late 20th century.
This research builds on that foundation, using genomic tools to explain the biology behind what Iñupiat communities observed generations ago.
Cold may be part of the answer: CIRBP stands for cold-inducible RNA-binding protein (it was originally identified as a protein activated by cold temperatures).
The fact that it is permanently elevated in bowhead cells may reflect the whale’s adaptation to life in near-freezing Arctic waters, with a cold-response mechanism that evolved to also serve as a powerful cancer defense.
A model species for aging science: The bowhead joins a small group of exceptionally long-lived animals, including the naked mole rat, that researchers are using to understand why some species age so slowly.
What makes the bowhead extraordinary is its combination of extreme size and extreme lifespan.
Most very large animals die relatively young; most very old animals are small.
The bowhead does both, making it uniquely valuable as a biological model.
For Arctic communities whose cultures and food systems have been intertwined with the bowhead whale for millennia, this research carries a particular resonance.
Iñupiat knowledge of whales’ longevity predates Western science by generations, and the biological mechanisms now being uncovered in laboratories are, in some sense, a translation of what hunters have already understood about these animals from direct observation over centuries.

Beyond the cultural dimension, the bowhead’s biology now stands as one of the most promising natural models for understanding how to slow aging and prevent cancer in humans.
The Arctic is not just a landscape being reshaped by climate change.
It is home to one of the most medically significant animals on Earth, and scientists are only just beginning to decipher what its genome has to say.

Read the full research here.

A volcano has erupted remnants of Earth's primordial magma ocean

 

Submarine reliefs produced by a survey off the coast of Mayotte in 2019, showing the new underwater volcano Fani Maoré

In May 2019, data from the Mayobs scientific expedition revealed that the volcano, located 50 kilometers from the island, stood just over 800 meters tall and was exhibiting intense activity at a depth of 3,500 meters. It is shown here circled in white on the eastern volcanic ridge.
MAYOBS – IPGP/CNRS/Ifremer/BRGM / Campagne MAYOBS2

From New Scientist by Christa Lesté-Lasserre

 
Earth was once covered by a global magma ocean, which later cooled and crystallised – now traces of this primordial event have been found in magma from a young volcano in the Indian Ocean

A rising underwater volcano off the coast of Madagascar has been spewing up chemical traces of material from a primordial magma ocean in the first 100 million years of Earth’s history.

Scientists generally suspect that Earth’s mantle – the thick layer of hot rock beneath the crust – has been steadily churning for more than 4 billion years, gradually erasing most chemical traces of the planet’s earliest history.

“This is going to change a lot of things [in earth science], because now we have proof that materials dating back 4.5 billion years – from the very beginning of Earth’s history – still exist in sufficient quantities to be sampled in a volcano,” says Catherine Chauvel at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

During the Hadean eon, a Mars-sized object collided with Earth, breaking off debris that scientists believe later formed the moon. 

 

visualization of Mayotte with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM nautical raster chart)

The impact heated the young planet so intensely that it became covered by a global magma ocean. 

Over the next few million years, the molten rock cooled and crystallised, and the earliest crust began to form above the mantle.

Some scientists suspected that traces of this primordial crystallisation survived in Earth’s mantle, but they lacked the analytical precision to prove it, says Chauvel.

In May 2018, an unusual swarm of earthquakes off the French island of Mayotte, between Madagascar and Mozambique, led scientists to discover a new volcano about 50 kilometres further east, named Fani Maoré. 

Eruptions over the following three years drained so much magma from underneath Mayotte that it sank about 20 centimetres.

Chauvel and her colleagues recovered volcanic rock samples from Fani Maoré and nearby Mayotte to compare the chemistry of the new volcano with that of the older volcanic system. 

They teamed up with Claudine Israel at the University of Cambridge to investigate further, using a newly developed ultra-precise technique to measure tiny differences in neodymium isotopes. 

Such isotopes preserve a chemical record of how Earth’s primordial magma ocean crystallised as the young planet cooled, says Israel.

This infographic (Julien Tredan-Turini. Courtesy of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie) illustrates the hypothesis of a magma chamber. 

The existence of a massive underground reservoir could explain the various phenomena observed in Mayotte.

The team found that, compared to Mayotte’s lava, the Fani Maoré lava had a slightly higher ratio of neodymium-142 to neodymium-144. 

That higher ratio probably reflects a pocket of ancient mantle that escaped billions of years of mixing and is still relatively rich in bridgmanite – a mineral thought to have been among the first to crystallise from Earth’s primordial magma ocean.

“It’s always exciting to find something you’ve been looking for – and that nobody else has found yet,” says Chauvel.

Map showing seismic activity hotspots since 2018 (red dots) along the Mayotte volcanic chain.
Lemoine et al. 2020; SHOM 2015; MAYOBS data from Feuillet et al. 2021. Comptes Rendus. Géoscience, Vol. 354 (2022), No. S2, pp. 105–136. doi: 10.5802/crgeos.191.

 

The findings suggest Earth’s mantle might never have become as thoroughly mixed as many geologists had assumed. 

That could help scientists reconstruct how Earth’s primordial magma ocean solidified, says Israel.

“For the first time, we’ve shown experimentally how the mantle crystallised from the magma ocean, and how that crystallisation created chemical heterogeneity from the very beginning,” she says.

The new findings provide plausible evidence that Earth’s mantle still preserves extremely ancient material, says Tim Johnson at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. 

“This seems to be an exciting advance,” he says.

“It takes an enormous amount of work to get a technique like that working properly, and it looks like they’ve succeeded,” says Bernard Bourdon at the CNRS in Lyon.

The study offers an unprecedented glimpse into a period of Earth’s history for which almost no direct evidence survives, he adds. 

“It’s a bit like discovering a sample of Earth’s core that somehow made it all the way to the surface,” says Bourdon.

For Richard Carlson at Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C., the precision alone is noteworthy. “Anyone who has experience with these measurements would recognise it as a major achievement,” he says.


Links :

• Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10719-w

The awesome of ocean waves

The awesome of ocean waves. pic.twitter.com/AGdMInP19O

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) July 7, 2026

Octopus and glass squids

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The line nobody owns

From Substack by Dr. John E. Nyberg

 
There are two international date lines.
They disagree by over two thousand kilometers.
Neither is enforceable, and no one has the standing to reconcile them.

A ship lies thirteen miles off Kiritimati, in the Line Islands of Kiribati.
Close enough that the crew can see land.

What day is it aboard?

Ashore, it is Monday.
Kiribati moved itself onto that side of the calendar in 1995, and that was its sovereign right.

Open a navigation text, however, and you find a different answer.
The nautical date line, the one ships were formally told to keep, sits on the 180th meridian: more than two thousand kilometers west of where Kiribati has put the political one.
By that reckoning, the water beneath the hull is still on Sunday.

Now go up to the bridge and ask the master.
He will tell you it is Monday, because he set the clocks and it is his call.

Three answers.
All three defensible.
And no authority on Earth manages it completely.

Two lines, and neither of them holds

The line you know is the zigzag, the one on every world map, jogging east around Kiribati and west around Samoa.
It has no world-wide legal standing at all.
No treaty defines it.
No organization maintains it.
It is a cartographic convention, a curve that chart and mapmakers draw by incorporating the time-zone decisions each Pacific state has made for itself.
When a country changes its mind, the line is redrawn.
That is the entire mechanism.
Cartographers do not fully agree on its precise course, and there is nobody to ask.

The second line is one most people have never heard of.
In June 1917 the Anglo-French Conference on Time-keeping at Sea met in London.
The British Admiralty and the French Navy established a nautical date line, with an idealized system of time zones for use at sea.
The major fleets adopted the recommendation between 1920 and 1925.

Their decision was a recommendation.
Two navies in a room, not a treaty.
Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, one of the standard references still issued to navigators today, describes the result plainly: a date line “fixed by informal agreement” is the driest possible way of admitting that no one signed anything binding.
States adopted it for their own fleets, which makes it national regulation rather than international law.
And in practice, nautical time is now used chiefly for radio coordination.
What time it is aboard a ship, for watches, for meals, for the clocks the crew actually live by, is set by the master, who advances them when he judges it convenient, and on short passages frequently does not bother at all.

So the nautical date line was never repealed.
It still appears in the reference works.
It still disagrees violently with the line on the map.
And it is honored mainly in the breach.

That is not a footnote to my argument.
That is my argument.

A standard nobody can enforce, reconcile, or retire

Look at what we actually have.

A maritime standard, established by international agreement, adopted by the world’s navies, still on the books after a century, which has drifted thousands of kilometers out of alignment with the boundary everyone else uses, and which has quietly stopped being observed.

Nobody enforces it.
Nobody has reconciled it with the political line.
And nobody has the standing to formally retire it either, because no body owns it.

A hundred years is a long time for an international standard to sit in that condition.
The reason it has been possible is not that the problem was solved.
It is that a workaround was found.

The workaround is UTC and it is not a solution

Here is the objection any maritime lawyer will raise, and it is a fair one: none of this is a problem, because everything with real legal weight is timestamped in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Zulu time has no date line, no zigzag and no ambiguity.
Log entries, position reports, distress traffic, contract timestamps put them all in UTC and the problem evaporates.

That is true.
It also explains why a century has passed without anyone fixing this.
We did not resolve the date line.
We routed around it.

But a workaround is not a custodian, and UTC does not touch what still depends on the line.

The depiction itself.
The date line appears on charts, in atlases, in reference works and in national statutes, and no authority stands behind any of it.
Cartographers reconcile it by watching the news.

Sovereign changes, made without notice.
In 1994 Kiribati deleted Saturday, 31 December from the calendar of its eastern islands, unifying a country that could otherwise conduct business with itself on only four days of the week.
In 2011 Samoa jumped westward to put its working week alongside Australia and New Zealand, and simply skipped 30 December, a date that legally does not exist there.
Tokelau followed.
Neither needed permission, because there was nobody to ask and no notice period to observe.
The world’s systems were patched afterwards.

Local dates in law and contract.
Statutes, charterparties and civil obligations run on calendar dates, not UTC timestamps.
A day that never happened is not a UTC problem.

Antarctica, where the line ceases to exist below roughly 60°S.
Stations keep whatever date their supply chain keeps.
McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott run on New Zealand time because the flights come out of Christchurch.
The one place on Earth where no state exercises sovereignty is the one place with no answer at all, which tells you exactly what has been holding this system together, and it is not law.
 

Who keeps the line now

The world’s operational date line, the one your phone, your airline and your bank actually consult, is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Time Zone Database.
It is a set of text files.
It is curated by a community on a public mailing list, led by volunteer coordinators.
It has no formal governance structure, no voting mechanism, no corporate sponsor and no guaranteed funding.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all depend on it.

This is not a criticism of that project, which has been maintained superbly for over forty years by people who have never received a fraction of what they are owed.
It is the point.

The tz database is a registry.
It records what sovereign states have already decided.
It has no standing to be consulted in advance, no power to request lead time, and no authority to decline an entry.
It is not a custodian.
It has simply been standing where a custodian ought to be, because nobody else was there.

The sovereignty objection, met directly

Propose that someone should own the date line and you will be told at once that this is an intolerable intrusion on sovereignty.
Samoa’s date is Samoa’s business.

It is.
Completely.
Any proposal that says otherwise deserves to fail.

But three things are being run together here and separating them dissolves the objection.

The date — which day it is in Apia.
Sovereign, full stop.
No international body should have any say in it whatsoever.

The line — the depicted boundary that results from summing all those sovereign choices.
Carried on charts.
Relied on in contracts.
Belonging to nobody.

The process — how a change is announced, how much warning the world gets, where the authoritative depiction lives, and what is to be done about a 1917 standard that no longer matches reality.
This does not exist at all.

A state may change its date.
It should not be able to change it by surprise, and it should not be drawing the line itself.
That is not a limit on sovereignty.
It is the same bargain every maritime state already accepts when it publishes a chart, files a notice to mariners, or registers a routing measure with the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

Who should hold it

There is no shortage of candidates, and each carries a liability worth stating plainly.

The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is a natural home.
The line is a charted feature, and charting standards is what the IHO does.
But its standard on the limits of oceans and seas, S-130, settles maritime limits.
It was never built to hold time.
Their current standard would either need to be adjusted, or a new IHO standard would need to be built.

The IMO has the only real regulatory power in this field and already administers routing measures that ships must obey.
But its remit is safety of navigation, and the date line might better be served by a standard that, once built, is recognized in IMO regulation.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) and the General Conference on Weights and Measures own time itself and have lately proved they can settle a contested question by voting to abolish the leap second.
But they do timescales, not geography, and the date line is a spatial object.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has a treaty basis and a long history with UTC.
It is itself mid-argument about the division of labor.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is fast, pragmatic, and already owns the date-format standard.
It has no authority over states whatsoever.

IANA is the incumbent, with neither mandate nor appetite.

Any of these would improve on nothing.
But none is quite right, because none is accountable to the people the line actually runs through.

A body where Kiribati has a permanent seat

The states the date line physically traverses are Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, a French overseas collectivity, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States.
Between them they hold very nearly every decision that has ever moved it.

They should have permanent seats.
Not as a courtesy, as a matter of standing.
They are not stakeholders in this question.
They are the primary parties, and the rest of us are downstream consumers of their decisions.

The design is not novel.
The Arctic Council seats Permanent Participants alongside its member states, on the principle that those with most at stake belong in the room regardless of their weight.
The Antarctic Treaty grants consultative status on the basis of substantial activity in the region rather than size.

A date-line body (which could be a working group of any of the above mentioned organizations) on that model would be small, cheap and technical.
It would maintain the authoritative depiction.
It would run a registry of sovereign date decisions with a published notification period.
It would reconcile the nautical and political lines or, at the very least, state plainly where they diverge, and formally retire what has died.
It would say something, at last, about Antarctica.

And it would be a body whose permanent seats are earned by standing in the line’s path, not by size or global reach, which is, I think, the most defensible allocation of authority in any international standards body I can name.

The day belongs to no one

The sea belongs to no one, and the same is true of the day.
Nobody owns Tuesday.

But belongs to no one and cared for by no one are not the same proposition, and the past century has quietly confused them.
A commons does not need an owner.
It needs a custodian, someone whose job is to write the thing down, keep it current, and tell the rest of us before it moves.

We never appointed one.
We found a workaround instead; the workaround held; the question was never forced.

Meanwhile the day still turns over somewhere out in the Pacific, at a place we have all agreed to imagine, on the authority of nobody in particular.
Thirteen miles off Kiritimati there are two published answers to what day it is, a hundred years of dust on one of them, and no one on Earth you can write to about it.

 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : The International Date Line Map you've seen is wrong /Lines of Longitude explained, with maps /How does a country go about changing its time zone /crossing the antimeridian (the 180th degree meridian) / Opinion: How the Prime Meridian changed the world