In early September 2004, two government scientists peered through the bubble windows of a Twin Otter whale-monitoring aircraft, scanning the Alaskan Beaufort Sea at 1,500 feet. They unexpectedly sighted the floating carcasses of four dead polar bears in open water far from pack ice or land. A year later in San Diego at an important biology conference, the two scientists, Charles Monnett and Jeffrey Gleason, and their co-author Lisa Rotterman — all three with the Department of the Interior — displayed their findings on a large poster card jammed with charts and graphs and a gripping title indicating that diminished Arctic ice was forcing polar bears into fatal open-water swimming.
They published their seven-page “observational notes” in Polar Biology, an obscure peer-reviewed science journal. Suspiciously missing from the original author credit line was Rotterman’s name: She’s the wife of lead author Charles Monnett, and an internal peer review official.
