Russia has sent a ship to the Arctic in an effort to save baby seals in danger of starving to death after freak weather conditions kept them away from their feeding grounds.
An estimated 350,000 seal pups, only a few weeks old, are trapped on ice floes in the northern White Sea. Under normal conditions, they should float over to the Barents Sea, to grow fat on plentiful supplies of fish and crustaceans.
But a change in direction of the polar wind has slowed the drift, and Russian experts who have flown over the area say most of the seals are likely to starve.
"There are about 350,000 baby seals on the ice floes," said Mr Vladimir Potelov, of the Polar Institute of Fish and Oceanography, in Archangel. "They are not adapted to life in the White Sea." He said 200,000 may die if they are unable to get to the Barents Sea.
But an easing of the wind in recent days has given the authorities hope that most seals will in the end be carried into the Barents Sea. Last night a specially chartered ship left the northern port of Murmansk heading for the seals.
The owners, the Murmansk Steam Ships Authority, said the crew could not stage a mass rescue but hoped, if the wind changed direction, to pick up the stragglers. "It is a huge problem. The ship really has no easy way of picking up the seals," said Ms Yelena Pachkova, co-ordinator of the maritime department of Moscow Greenpeace. "It really depends on the weather."
Greenpeace is standing by to send a helicopter.