Oxygen

More than a third of the Chesapeake Bay was a low-oxygen "dead zone" during monitoring this month, meaning the nation's largest estuary is on pace to have one of its most unhealthy summers on record, according to data released yesterday. "The things we love to eat out of the bay will not do well with this kind of summer," said Bill Dennison, ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "Oxygen is a crucial part of the environment for the fish and crabs and oysters, and having low oxygen or no oxygen is just as devastating for them as bulldozing a forest is for other creatures."

ON THE CHESAPEAKE BAY - As he pulled his traps from the water south of Calvert Cliffs yesterday morning, Bobby Darnell could sense the dead crabs were coming. "Look at how they're clinging to the pots when we bring them up," said Darnell, who has been crabbing out of nearby Solomons since 1980. "When they cling, you know there's not enough oxygen for them. Next time I'm here, I'll probably bring them up and they'll be dead." Across the bay this summer, commercial and recreational fishermen and crabbers say they're finding unusually large patches of water that are all but devoid of oxygen - and life.

ON THE CHESAPEAKE BAY - Motoring through lifeless waters, charter boat captain Richie Gaines suddenly ran into a patch boiling with hundreds of silver-bellied rockfish, packed together so tightly they were leaping out of the water. Tails thrashed. Seagulls shrieked and dove at the feast near the mouth of the Chester River. Gaines unholstered his fly rod, plucking out 27 fish in just a few minutes, reeling in another with nearly every cast. He might have been delighted - but instead he found the thicket of fish disturbing.

THIS WEEK, if you attend at all to television or print news, you will know that "bad water," meaning water that is low on or devoid of oxygen, is ravaging the bay this summer with almost unprecedented fury. On Wednesday, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation staged a floating news conference to show the human face of what has become an annual out-of-sight, out-of-mind tragedy beneath the Chesapeake's tranquil surface. Chock-a-block with media from around the metro region, Capt. Sonney Forrest's 46-foot charter boat, Fin Finder, left the dock at Solomons about 6 a.m. Wednesday.

As a young doctor training in Washington after World War II, Arnall Patz witnessed a revolution. A new kind of incubator, sealed on all sides to contain an inner climate, was enabling doctors to save premature babies at rates never before seen. But something was wrong. Patz noticed that the advance coincided with an epidemic of infant blindness, and that most of the victims were "preemies" who lay for weeks in an atmosphere of near-total oxygen. In a question that outraged physicians at the time but later won their admiration, Patz wondered whether there might be a connection.

SHELLTOWN -- The stench of thousands and thousands of decaying fish wasn't exactly sweet for Charles Poukish and other state scientists out patrolling a remote tributary of the Pocomoke River yesterday, but they were nonetheless relieved.After discovering a half-million or more dead menhaden this week -- the largest fish kill in the bay in 10 years -- state officials say they're happy to have found no evidence of Pfiesteria piscicida, the deadly microbe that attacked fish and sickened watermen in 1997, forcing the closure of the Pocomoke and two other state waterways.

J. Adam Hewison has done his homework - trolling Web sites for facts on dissolved oxygen, talking with watermen who have worked on the Chesapeake Bay most of their lives - and he says he knows a cheap way to clean the bay. The answer is windmills. Not your typical barnyard variety, but a variation that could be rigged on barges, along shorelines and near oyster beds to deliver life-giving oxygen to some of the most polluted areas of the bay, watery trenches that are void of life today.

Forget Aaron's 755 home runs. Cal's consecutive games streak. Secretariat's Triple Crown. Laver's Grand Slams. Take them all and put them in the attic. None of these sports heroes can breathe the same air as Babu Chiri Sherpa. Literally. Chiri is the 34-year-old climber from Nepal who, on May 21, dashed to the top of 29,035-foot Mount Everest in just under 17 hours without using bottled oxygen. He shattered the old record set in 1998 by 2: hours. Before you yawn and reach for another bagel, consider this: Most people take three months to get from base camp at 17,500 feet to the summit, using a gradual acclimatization process.

MOSCOW -- As the tranquil Arctic dusk turned pink and gold last night, Norwegian divers and a British rescue craft prepared to descend to the remains of the Kursk. But a Russian admiral said it was unlikely there would be anyone left alive to rescue. A week after the nuclear-powered submarine plunged to the bottom of the Barents Sea, Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of the Northern Fleet, said the navy had been able to piece together a partial idea of the horrifying minutes, hours and days after the accident.

Some skiers pay a steep price for a week of powder, even if they get good rates on flights, accommodations and lift tickets. That's because even the most savvy traveler can't negotiate altitude out of the deal.Everyone reacts differently to a change in elevation, but it is not unusual for the human body to do a physiological snow-plow during the first few days of a ski trip."You will probably feel the worst about 48 hours after arriving," said Barry Mink, an internist at the Aspen (Colo.)