Talk:Operation Breakthrough

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A fact from Operation Breakthrough appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 25 May 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Operation Breakthrough was an international effort to free three gray whales from pack ice in the Beaufort Sea near Point Barrow in the U.S. state of Alaska in 1988?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2011/May.

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A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the On this day section on October 7, 2018.

Coverage[edit]

The book Eye of the Whale has more detail about the operation; feel free to review the relevant chapters through Amazon.com or Google Books Search. Erik (talk | contribs) 17:31, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This provides excerpts from Rose's book. Erik (talk | contribs) 20:56, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

With no due respect to commercialism, I will simply respect the efforts of one species to help another, for once.Wzrd1 (talk) 05:53, 3 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Whale survival[edit]

There was a notable article on this subject that appeared in the McClatchy newspapers on February 3, 2012 by way of the Anchorage Daily News. The article recounted the rescue efforts intended to free the three trapped young whales and describes the effort as good intention but ultimately futile. The article cites how while a path to free the whales was ultimately cleared by the rescue team the whales refused to swim out to sea. Radio tags were not placed on the whales to verify if they escaped, seemingly to ensure that the story had a happy ending. While the fate of the whales is unknown it is most likely that the whales perished.

I believe that the McClatchy article is best potential source on the subject so far, and I am planning on making edits to this article to incorporate the information presented in it. We do not know, and we can never know what the fate of these whales was. However, it should be clear to readers of this article what the likely outcome of this story was.

UPDATE: Saved the edits. Added passages on the whale's health, the radio tracking tags, and the unknown outcome of the rescue.

Update citation url[edit]

I can’t figure out how to edit but the correct url for citation 4 (time magazine) is http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,968853,00.html DSLeB (talk) 04:49, 9 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

DSLeB, I have updated the URL. Thank you very much! Erik (talk | contrib) ^{(ping me)} 19:34, 9 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]