COASTAL CRITICAL ZONE

Category: Research Team

Critical Zone Collaborative Network

What is seawater intrusion? A hydrogeologist explains the shifting balance between fresh and salt water at the coast

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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Ghost forests haunt the East Coast, harbingers of sea-level rise

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

Salted Earth

Check out our recent video about the Coastal CZN research project. Click link here.

Climate-driven decoupling of wetland and upland biomass trends on the mid-Atlantic coast

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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Sea level rise leading to growing number of coastal ‘ghost forests’

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.

This ecologist thinks coastal wetlands can outrun rising seas. Not everyone’s convinced

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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Saltwater Intrusion

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.