Washington Post
By Devin Powell
September 22
ABOARD THE USCGC HEALY — On a ship near the top of the planet, a 120-pound steel claw dumps out mud freshly scooped from the bottom of the sea. Jackie Grebmeier gets to work with a pair of tweezers, picking shrimplike critters called amphipods out of the muck.
Grebmeier has been digging up animals in the waters between Alaska and Russia for more than 30 years. And she has noticed a trend: A retreat has begun here at the edge of the Arctic. With temperatures rising, creatures such as amphipods have been inching northward. Meanwhile, clams and fish and whales from balmier climes have begun to move in.
“We’re starting to see changes that we’ve never seen in the decades we’ve been studying this area,” says Grebmeier, a biological oceanographer at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) in Solomons.
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