SUNDAY 04.12.2009 C baltimoresun.com / maryland closeup

The Arctic is warming, and thesea ice is thinner than anyonehas seen before. That couldspell trouble for walruses, seaducks and a host of other spe-cies — including humans —that depend on the North tosustain them.

An international team of researchers, in-cluding some from Maryland, spent much ofMarch aboard a Coast Guard icebreaker in theBering Sea, gathering evidence that mighthelp explain what’s happening there. Endur-ing fierce winds and temperatures thatdipped to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit attimes, they sampled the ice off the coast ofAlaska, scooped up clams and other creaturesfrom the sea bottom and scouted by helicop-ter across the vast white landscape to findand tag walruses.

“In some ways, it’s like a three-ring circus,”said Lee Cooper, chief scientist for the cruiseand a research professor at the University ofMaryland’s Chesapeake Biological Labora-tory. With nearly three dozen researchersfrom the United States, Canada and abroad,the icebreaker Healy was a hive of activity vir-tually around the clock.

The three-week cruise was part of a six-year, $52 million study of the changing cli-mate’s impact on a region whose importancestretches far beyond its shores. Besides offer-ing early signs of an ecological upheaval thatcould sweep across a warming planet, the Be-ring Sea supplies half of the seafood eaten inthe United States.

“Changes here affect the entire countryand seafood markets abroad,” said FrancisWiese, senior scientist for the North PacificResearch Board in Anchorage, which is coor-dinating the study in partnership with theNational Science Foundation. Those changesalso threaten the way of life and possibly theexistence of remote native communities suchas Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island. TheYup’ik people there have traditionally sub-sisted by hunting walruses and other preyacross the frozen sea.

About a decade ago, scientists noticed thatthe ice covering much of the Bering Sea in

winter was melting earlier and faster than be-fore. Weak or vanishing ice means the long-tusked Pacific walruses that congregate in theshallow waters off Alaska’s coast have fewerplaces to haul out of the frigid water.

The mammals feed mainly on clams,worms and other tiny creatures on the bot-tom, using their sensitive whiskers to locateprey amid the sand and muck. The ice pro-vides the animals a floating platform onwhich to rest between foraging dives. The fe-males also bear their young there.

As the ice begins to melt in April, the wal-

ruses begin moving north, passing throughthe Bering Strait to the Chukchi Sea by sum-mer. The Chukchi sea ice also is melting morein summer, and scientists have noticed “somevery dramatic responses” there, said ChadJay, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Sur-vey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage.

With no ice left in their traditional shallow-water feeding grounds, many walruses havemigrated to land along the coast.

“But we might be seeing some more subtlechanges in the Bering as well,” Jay said.

There, the husband-wife team of Cooper

and Jacqueline Grebmeier, also a researchprofessor at Maryland’s Chesapeake lab,think the melting ice might be affecting morethan the walruses’ loafing habits. Sampling

A polar bear guard (foreground) provided by the U.S. Coast Guard protects researchers working near the icebreaker Healy.

Two female Pacific walrus rest on an ice floe. A six-year, $52 million proj-ect is studying the widespread effects of climate change in the BeringSea region. PHOTOS: ANDREW TRITES, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Marylanders are on internationalteam gathering climate change data

Polarmission

TIM WHEELER tim.wheeler@baltsun.com

BALTIMORE SUN GRAPHIC

bering sea study

RUSSIARUSSIA

Aleutian Islands

ALASKAALASKA

FairbanksFairbanks

AnchorageAnchorage

St. Lawrence Island

St. Lawrence Island

Gulf ofAlaska

Pacific Ocean

BeringSea

ChukchiSea

CANAD

ACAN

ADA

U.S.

U.S.

Arctic Ocean

Dutch HarborDutch Harbor

See BERING, page 4

@baltimoresun.com

For more on the Bering Sea mission, goto /bayblog

I think I’ve come up with the ultimate ear-mark: “BioAgroEco Infrastructure Im-provements to 911 Communications,Chesapeake Oyster Protection and End-

less Preparations for BRAC — Plus a LittleSomething for Girl Scouts, Easter Seals andVictims of Head Trauma.”

Reading through the earmark wish liststhat Maryland’s congressional representa-tives have compiled, I thought of that old songabout the ultimate country lyrics, covering allthe bases beloved by that genre: “Well, I wasdrunk the day my mama got out of prison, and Iwent to pick her up in the rain. But before I couldget to the station in a pickup truck, she gotrunned over by a damned old train.”

So it is with the earmarks that Maryland’sdelegation are requesting — all the usual sus-pects on the state’s checklist of the deservingget a nod, or five: the bay, the police, the chil-dren, the military, the medical research.

Thanks to the new transparency that Con-

gress is now supposed to be operating underwhen it comes to the hot topic of earmarks,House members had to make public whichprojects they want funded in the 2010 budget.(Senators have a later deadline to do thesame.)

Earmarks, of course, became a campaignissue last year, denounced as the ultimate ingovernment waste and pork barrel spending.Never mind that a) they represent a tiny frac-tion, 1 percent or 2 percent, of total federalspending and b) their loudest critics oftenturned out to be the same ones who re-quested and accepted them for their states.

Still, earmarks remain the potato chip of

politicians. They may be bad for you — someopponent is likely to find a mockable requestyou’ve made involving fruit flies or volcanoes— but they’re ultimately irresistible.

For all the cheap and easy outrage you cangenerate by highlighting a project that seemstrivial — some of the great advances in sci-ence, after all, have come from research in-volving fruit flies — surely earmarks havefunded some worthy local projects that other-wise wouldn’t have come to the attention ofthose who control the budget in Washington.

So the solution was not to outlaw earmarksbut to make the process a more public one:

An eye on earmarks: There’s something in them for everyone

jeanmarbellajean.marbella@baltsun.com

See MARBELLA, page 5

4 maryland closeup C the baltimore sun sunday 04.12.2009

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With spring here, thechange of season hasEmily Emerick andher staff at LadewTopiary Gardenshopping. Emerick,executive director ofthe historic house

and gardens in Harford County, spent recentweeks prepping for the March 28 opening ofthe 2009 season.

At Ladew, she’s doing something she hasloved since she was 4 years old. The Towsonnative’s earliest memories revolve aroundwatching her mother in a denim wrappedskirt and a bandanna preparing garden bedsand planting rhubarb, asparagus and straw-berries.

Although Emerick, 48, majored in Englishat Washington College, she has never ven-tured too far from gardening. Today, she over-sees Harvey S. Ladew’s former home, a popu-lar tourist attraction that includes a countryhouse and 22 acres of gardens with whimsicaltopiary designs.

We asked her about her career and love ofgardening.

When did you know that gardening wasmore than a hobby, something youwanted to devote your life to?

I bought a house and realized that every-one else’s house had more thought going intoit than [mine]. You see the ones that had aninterest and passion in gardening. When it’s apermanent place and something that you’regoing to be in for a while, it’s a lovely thing todo some work around the house and see thereward. There really is an obsessive nature tothis thing. Gardeners are obsessive people,but in a good way.

How did you arrive at Ladew?I was an amateur gardener, and I was in de-

velopment work and fundraising. I came onthe board about 15 years ago and have beenhere since.

Describe the final preparations to getthe grounds ready for the season’s open-ing.

The roses, which we like to leave until thevery last minute because we don’t like forthem to throw off new shoots when coldweather is still imminent, they were allpruned. The ponds were prepped and allfilled.

The koi fish will come out of dormancywhen the temperature reaches 55. We’rekeeping an eye on them but not starting tofeed them quite yet. We’ve cleaned up thebeds, raking out any of the material that’s fall-en in them over the winter. We haven’t had tomow yet because it’s been so chilly.

Is the staff energized by the opening?

It’s been great, in part, because the winterhas seemed so long this year. It has been somuch chillier. But it’s greening up here. Wehad a long, beige winter, and now it’s a brightgreen, which is just great. Most of the peoplehere love gardening. What we’re about is agarden and historic home, and everybody isinto those things. It’s a very positive energyaround here when we’re getting ready toshow Ladew’s place.

Are the bulbs on schedule?We had that warm spell a couple of week-

ends ago. I would say a lot of what we’re see-ing now in terms of the bulbs that are comingup are from that spell. The forsythia is justabout to bloom. The hellebores in the Wood-land Garden are blooming. They are a very

early perennial. But unlike some of our reallyearly, really warm springs, everything is hold-ing off a little bit, which means that when itgoes, it’s going to be a fantastic show. Everyday that it gets warmer, we get closer toblooming.

It’s been dry so far, with rainfall levelslower than normal. Has that affectedthe grounds?

Not yet because it’s been so cold thisspring, so a lot of things aren’t pushing yet.Now if it were really warm and very dry, andplants were really throwing out a lot of newgrowth and didn’t have much moisture, that’swhen we’re going to start seeing possible ef-fects. But for the time being, it’s a perfectlylong, cool spring, which we rarely enjoy here.

passionate about: gardens

Behind the bloomsThere’s lots to do to prepare the Ladew Gardens for the publicBRENT JONES brent.jones@baltsun.com

Emily Emerick, head of the Ladew house and topiary gardens, in the greenhouse. BALTIMORE SUN PHOTO: AMY DAVIS

conducted over the past 25 years by Greb-meier and others has shown declines in thepopulation of bottom-dwelling creatures inthe eastern Bering Sea, meaning a decrease inthe food supply for walruses, Cooper said.

The researchers think the drop-off inclams and worms could also stem from thechanging climate, by affecting the bottom-dwellers’ food supply.

Algae, tiny plant-like organisms that arethe base of the sea’s food chain, grow on theunderside of the ice. In spring, lengtheningdaylight and warming temperatures triggermassive “blooms” of algae in the water alongthe receding edge of the melting pack. Themollusks and crustaceans on the bottom feedon the fallout from that burst of life in the wa-ter.

“Because the ice is starting to disappearearlier,” Cooper said, “there may not be asmuch food getting to the bottom anymore insuch a big pulse.”

The Maryland research team spent hoursoutside on the stern of the 420-foot icebreaker,dredging the bottom and then screening outthe clams and other creatures in the muck sothey could be identified and counted.

Meanwhile, other scientists disembarkedfrom the ship to take ice cores for analysis. Asthey worked, armed Coast Guard crew mem-bers kept watch across the white plain for po-lar bears that might see the scientists as theirnext meal.

Jay and his team took off from the Healy ina helicopter to find walruses and tagged 17 ofthem — from a distance, given the animals’size. Using a crossbow, they fired transmitterswith barbed heads into the animals’ blubberyhides so scientists could track their move-ments by satellite.

Still other researchers canvassed the openwaters around St. Lawrence Island for flocksof spectacled eiders, large sea ducks that win-ter in the eastern Bering Sea. Their numbershave plummeted since the 1970s, and they’relisted as threatened.

Suspected causes include hunting pres-sure, chemical contamination and changes infood supply. Like walruses, they dive to thebottom to feed on the mollusks and littlecrabs that have declined over that period.

Researchers aren’t sure how many Pacificwalruses there are in the Bering and Chukchiseas. A 1990 aerial survey estimated 200,000,but the tally is considered soft because theanimals spend most of their time in the wa-ter, where it’s hard to count them. A petitionhas been filed to classify them as endangered,however, because of the threats posed bychanges in their icy habitat.

Their sampling done, the scientists re-turned to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and flewhome at the end of March, past eruptingMount Redoubt. Back in their labs, Cooperand the others now turn to analyzing, com-paring and publishing findings from the datathey collected in those few weeks — a processthat will take months or years.

“Most of the work from this cruise is stillahead of us,” Cooper said.

This year, scientists are nearing the mid-point in the six-year Bering Sea Project. Ulti-mately, they hope this cruise and the rest ofthe study will help them identify the patternin changes they’re seeing. They will use thatknowledge to predict future conditions.

“It has huge implications, and it’s verycomplicated to figure out,” said Wiese, of thePacific Research Board. “There’s a lot ofchanges, and the changes are occurring quick-ly.”

Icebreaker becomes hive of scientific activityBERING, From page 1

Sea ice scientist Dr. Rolf Gradinger removes an ice core from an ice auger aspart of a study of warming effects. PHOTO: ANDREW TRITES, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA