Underwater Grasses

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Physician named 1 of most influential A Johns Hopkins physician whose research focuses on improving patient care - including the use lof airline-style checklists in critical care units - has been named to this year's list of Time magazine's 100 most influential people. Dr. Peter Pronovost, a professor of anesthesiology and critical care, was cited for his efforts to improve the way medical care is delivered to patients around the world. This year, Provonost's work drew headlines when federal regulators told Michigan hospitals to stop providing him with data while they reviewed whether his studies technically violated informed consent rules.

The health of Chesapeake Bay slid backward last year, hampered by water pollution, development and threats to the blue crab fishery, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. In its annual report card, the nonprofit environmental group said the bay's health dropped a point, from 28 to 27 on a scale of 100. The score marked the first decline in recent years. The perfect score represents the estuary's condition when European settlers arrived. Foundation members concede that level cannot be achieved, but say they would settle for a score of 70. "After two decades of modest improvements, the bay remains dangerously out of balance," said William C. Baker, foundation president.

THE DROUGHT has given Marylanders a momentary glimpse of what the Chesapeake Bay could be. The lack of rain has led to a lack of runoff into the bay, and that means clear water. No nitrogen to feed algae blooms, no sediment to cloud things up generally. The clear water encourages underwater grasses, and the beds of underwater grasses lead to even clearer water. In shallow bays and streams, especially on the Western Shore, the grasses are booming, and with them perch, pickerel, juvenile rockfish and crabs.

Faced with evidence that commercial clamming gear is damaging delicate underwater grasses in Maryland bays, a Senate committee has approved an emergency bill to ban the clammers' dredges from all of the state's grass beds.The bill, which passed the Senate Economic and Environmental Affairs Committee yesterday, has the support of environmentalists and watermen. One key legislator predicted it will become law by early June.That would be a boon to crabbers, who rely on the underwater grasses to nurture young blue crabs and protect them from predators.

SMOKEHOUSE COVE - A potential killer so small that scientists need special equipment to detect it swims in these waters off the St. Martin River. Given the right conditions, it could destroy underwater grasses and starve shellfish, which is why state officials are keeping track of it. Every two weeks in the spring and fall, state Department of Natural Resources and National Park Service crews take water samples near this Worcester County marsh and at...

Cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay has always been a challenge, because it pits the concrete rewards of profit and expediency against an environmental vision, whose impact lies in the future.Given those restraints, Maryland has done reasonably well; reducing phosphates in waste water, for instance, and raising public awareness of the problem. But increasingly the marriage of federal laissez faire philosophy and the recession has eroded that civic commitment. A glaring example is the decision to let Texaco do exploratory drilling in Charles County, which environmentalists say threatens the integrity of the bay. But the Bush administration deserves dishonorable mention for its waffling on new regulations to open for development thousands of acres of wetlands around the bay, which now act as sponges for runoff and pollutants.

Seeds buried in the mud of Chesapeake rivers for as long as 2,000 years show that human beings, not forces of nature, are to blame for the destructive disappearance of the bay's lush underwater grasses. That's the conclusion of a new study by two Johns Hopkins University scientists who dug deep into 12 bay rivers and creeks, bringing up long cylinders of sediment deposited on the bottom over the past two millennia. Buried in the sediment are pollen, seeds and other clues that tell experts when and how some major changes took place in the bay's environment.

The Chesapeake Bay is at a critical point in its 10,000-year history. The actions taken today and the commitments made as we enter the next millennium will determine whether the bay will live or die.To put this in perspective, it is important to understand the bay's history. It was created when the last ice age receded and ocean levels rose, flooding the old Susquehanna River valley. The bay's first 9,700 years were largely free from pollution, with too little human settlement to cause any detrimental impact on the vast 64,000-square- mile watershed and the 200-mile main stem.

A new study suggests it may be impossible to restore Chesapeake Bay unless mid-Atlantic air pollution is sharply curtailed and New York, Delaware and West Virginia can be drawn into the cleanup campaign.The bay could make at least a partial recovery from decades of pollution if Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia stick to their 1987 goal of cleaning up sewage discharges and curbing runoff from farmland and development, the study concludes.A preliminary draft of the study, compiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and based on a sophisticated computer "model" of the bay, is to be presented Thursday to a panel of federal and state officials.

Floods in the mid-Atlantic region have been dumping near-record amounts of mud and polluting nutrients into the Chesapeake Bay."A big storm event like this scours out sediment and carries proportionally more than a normal flow," said Robert Magnien, director of tidewater ecosystem assessment for the Department of Natural Resources. The weekend's floods probably will dump more mud and nutrients into the bay than will be washed in during the rest of the year, he said.The last time flooding was this severe -- during Tropical Storm Agnes in June 1972 -- the bay suffered drastic losses of underwater grasses, crabs, fish and shellfish.