Up and down the mid-Atlantic coast, sea levels are rising rapidly, creating stands of dead trees — often bleached, sometimes blackened — known as ghost forests.
The water is gaining as much as 5 millimeters per year in some places, well above the global average of 3.1 millimeters, driven by profound environmental shifts that include climate change.
Increasingly powerful storms, a consequence of a warming world, push seawater inland. More intense dry spells reduce freshwater flowing outward. Adding to the peril, in some places the land is naturally sinking.
All of this allows seawater to claim new territory, killing trees from the roots up.
Rising seas often conjure the threat to faraway, low-lying nations or island-states. But to understand the immediate consequences of some of the most rapid sea-level rise anywhere in the world, stand among the scraggly, dying pines of Dorchester County along the Maryland coast.
Chesapeake Bay’s migrating marshes
People living on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, the country’s largest estuary system, have a front-row view of the sea’s rapid advance, said Keryn Gedan, a wetland ecologist at George Washington University.
Part of the reason for the quickly rising waters may be that the Gulf Stream, which flows northward up the coast, is slowing down as meltwater from Greenland inhibits its flow. That is causing what some scientists describe as a pileup of water along the East Coast, elevating sea levels locally.
The effects of climate change are also exacerbated by land that is sinking as a result of geological processes triggered by the end of the last ice age.
Because of the extraordinary speed at which the water is rising here, Dr. Gedan said, “I think of this area as a window into the future for the rest of the world.”
Much more at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...tion=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage
The water is gaining as much as 5 millimeters per year in some places, well above the global average of 3.1 millimeters, driven by profound environmental shifts that include climate change.
Increasingly powerful storms, a consequence of a warming world, push seawater inland. More intense dry spells reduce freshwater flowing outward. Adding to the peril, in some places the land is naturally sinking.
All of this allows seawater to claim new territory, killing trees from the roots up.
Rising seas often conjure the threat to faraway, low-lying nations or island-states. But to understand the immediate consequences of some of the most rapid sea-level rise anywhere in the world, stand among the scraggly, dying pines of Dorchester County along the Maryland coast.
Chesapeake Bay’s migrating marshes
People living on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, the country’s largest estuary system, have a front-row view of the sea’s rapid advance, said Keryn Gedan, a wetland ecologist at George Washington University.
Part of the reason for the quickly rising waters may be that the Gulf Stream, which flows northward up the coast, is slowing down as meltwater from Greenland inhibits its flow. That is causing what some scientists describe as a pileup of water along the East Coast, elevating sea levels locally.
The effects of climate change are also exacerbated by land that is sinking as a result of geological processes triggered by the end of the last ice age.
Because of the extraordinary speed at which the water is rising here, Dr. Gedan said, “I think of this area as a window into the future for the rest of the world.”
Much more at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...tion=click&module=Top Stories&pgtype=Homepage
