An important focus for scientific study in the Alaskan offshore area is the bowhead whale.

Bowhead whales, distinctive for their huge, comb-like baleen and thick blubber, migrate annually between the Canadian Beaufort Sea and the Bering Sea. The bowhead whale is vitally important to traditional subsistence hunters located along the migration route. Bowhead whales are an endangered species and therefore protected by United States law.

The annual spring migration begins when the whales move up through the Chukchi Sea and into the Beaufort Sea. They pass by the North Slope city of Barrow in late April, early May in three pulses or "three schools" as the Inupiat whalers put it. This is when the Inupiat conduct their spring subsistence hunt for bowheads.

In 1972, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) requested information on the bowhead population, hunting pressure, and trends after noting the absence of data on the size of the Bering Sea bowhead population and details of subsistence whaling. As a result of the IWC’s concern and the lack of data, the bowhead whale census was started in the spring of 1976. The last complete whale census was conducted in 1993. It determined that there were about 8,200 bowheads increasing at a rate of about three- percent per year. This year’s whale census was a cooperative effort financed by the North Slope Borough and the National Marines Fisheries Service with a donation from British Petroleum. Key to the census effort, is the support of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and the Barrow Whaling Captains.

The whale hunt is an essential part of Inupiat culture not only for food but because of the significance and symbolism of the hunting, the teamwork, the leadership and knowledge required, the rite of passage and acceptance, the acknowledgement of place in the community and the process for community-wide distribution of the whale after a successful hunt. The gift of the whale itself to the hunters is part of the inter-relationship of man and nature.