Seawater intrusion is the movement of saline water from the ocean or estuaries into freshwater systems. The seawater that has crept up the Mississippi River in the summer and early fall of 2023 is a reminder that coastal communities teeter in a fragile land-sea balance. Our own Dr. Holly Michael offers insights on the shifting…
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About 100 miles from the nation’s capital, near Taylor’s Island and Fishing Creek on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, hundreds of acres of dead trees stand upright, like toothpicks piercing the sky. They are among the mid-Atlantic’s largest “ghost forests,” woodlands rapidly converted to marsh because of sea-level rise. To learn more, click link here. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2314607120
Check out our recent video about the Coastal CZN research project. Click link here.
The Kirwan group at VIMS has developed a study to systematically evaluate the dynamic association between four decades of sea-level driven coastal landscape organization and ecosystem carbon pools along the rapidly warming and receding coast of the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. By integrating observations across traditional ecosystem boundaries, the results pointed to a fundamental decoupling between negative…
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Ghost forests are cropping up along parts of America’s coastline, particularly along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Trees are giving way to marshes and changing the very nature of the coastline, potentially making some areas more susceptible to erosion and storm surge. To learn more, click link here.
BLACKWATER NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE IN MARYLAND—Coastal scientist Matt Kirwan has a sense of what it’s like to flee from rising seas. More than 100 years ago, Kirwan’s great-great-grandfather owned a farm close to this sprawling wetland refuge near the Chesapeake Bay, a key annual migration stop for hundreds of thousands of geese, ducks, and other waterbirds.…
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Climate change and sea level rise are increasing the amount of saltwater that intrudes across coastal ecosystems, and scientists are anxious to understand how these systems are experiencing these changes in real time.
