Commercial whaling has decimated whale population after whale population. The development of new technology in the first part of the twentieth century, such as the introduction in 1925 of the first factory ship, enabled the whaling nations to hunt whales in the vast seas that surround Antarctica. The same pattern of destructive over-exploitation that characterises all commercial whaling operations occurred in these Southern Oceans. It has been estimated that in the fifty years from 1925-1975 over 1.5 million whales were killed in total, the majority of these in Antarctic waters. Finally after decades of uncontrolled whaling and the resulting collapse of whale populations, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) agreed to an indefinite moratorium on commercial whaling which came into effect in 1986. Now, on the brink of the new millennium only one country is still killing whales in the Southern Ocean Japan - and it does so in violation of international law.
