The Arctic is warming, and the sea ice is thinner than anyone has seen before. That could spell trouble for walruses, sea ducks and a host of other species - including humans - that depend on the North to sustain them.
An international team of researchers, including some from Maryland, spent much of March aboard a Coast Guard icebreaker in the Bering Sea, gathering evidence that might help explain what's happening there. Enduring fierce winds and temperatures that dipped to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit at times, they sampled the ice off the coast of Alaska, scooped up clams and other creatures from the sea bottom and scouted by helicopter across the vast white landscape to find and tag walruses.
"In some ways, it's like a three-ring circus," said Lee Cooper, chief scientist for the cruise and a research professor at the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. With nearly three dozen researchers from the United States, Canada and abroad, the icebreaker Healy was a hive of activity virtually around the clock.
The three-week cruise was part of a six-year, $52 million study of the changing climate's impact on a region whose importance stretches far beyond its shores. Besides offering early signs of an ecological upheaval that could sweep across a warming planet, the Bering Sea supplies half of the seafood eaten in the United States.
"Changes here affect the entire country and seafood markets abroad," said Francis Wiese, senior scientist for the North Pacific Research Board in Anchorage, which is coordinating the study in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Those changes also threaten the way of life and possibly the existence of remote native communities such as Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island. The Yup'ik people there have traditionally subsisted by hunting walruses and other prey across the frozen sea.
About a decade ago, scientists noticed that the ice covering much of the Bering Sea in winter was melting earlier and faster than before. Weak or vanishing ice means the long-tusked Pacific walruses that congregate in the shallow waters off Alaska's coast have fewer places to haul out of the frigid water.
The mammals feed mainly on clams, worms and other tiny creatures on the bottom, using their sensitive whiskers to locate prey amid the sand and muck. The ice provides the animals a floating platform on which to rest between foraging dives. The females also bear their young there.
