Originally Published January 2020.
In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas, wreaking mass destruction and rendering portions of the island chain uninhabitable. That same month, students around the world spoke out against the climate crisis, many skipping school in unity with teen activist Greta Thunberg and the Global Climate Strike. The strike was intended to coincide with the United Nations Climate Action Summit, wherein UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres hoped to mobilize countries from around the world to fight global warming.
In October 2019, the City of Annapolis experienced unusually high tides from a tropical storm off the mid-Atlantic coast that caused an early close to the U.S. Sailboat Show. That same month, The Chesapeake Bay Foundation announced the closure of Fox Island Environmental Education Center, citing sea level rise, erosion, and dramatic loss of protective salt marshes around the facility.
Climate change is not new news. Neither are strikes or calls for legislative action. But in a time when unpredictable superstorms of unprecedented strength, encroaching floods, and massive pollution threaten common plants, wildlife, human infrastructure, and, indeed, the way we live, the call to address climate change has never been more real.
Scientists refer to the Mid-Atlantic and especially the Chesapeake Bay as ground zero for a real-time model of how climate change will impact human life in the next 30 to 100 years. Warming oceans, a result of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and the melting of polar ice, along with erosion caused by drought and stronger, more destructive storms, are predicted to cause sea level in the Chesapeake to rise not to the tune of just millimeters, but of feet.
The Scientific and Technical Working Group of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change says in their recent report, “Updating Maryland’s Sea Level Rise Projections,” that Maryland residents should plan for the state’s coastal waters to rise by 2.1 feet by the year 2050 and by 3.7 feet or more by the Century’s end. A synopsis of the report states that the forecast of a 3.7-foot increase by 2100 represents the working group’s best estimate; it is in the middle of the projected range (2.1 to 5.7 feet).
Scientists at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) confirmed the working group’s report. “Sea level rise is exacerbated by land subsidence,” CBF wrote on their website in an announcement of a 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “This combination of processes has resulted in approximately one foot of net sea-level rise in the Chesapeake Bay over the past 100 years—a rate nearly twice that of the global historic average. According to some scientists, the region might see as much as a three- to four-foot sea level rise this century.” Captain Enil Petruncio, U.S. Navy, Retired, is the former chair of the Naval Academy’s Oceanography Department and a founding member of the Navy’s Sea Level Rise Advisory Council. He says, in general, sea level is occurring around the globe but that the Chesapeake Bay will be hit especially hard. “In the Mid-Atlantic, we have a double whammy, because the ground here is sinking, called subsidence. We have episodic erosion caused by wave action, a steady rate of subsidence and accelerating sea level rise.”
Why do climate change and its role in sea level rise matter? For the City of Annapolis, it means the historic downtown and City Dock area could see more and worse flooding. Annapolis experienced 63 high-tide floods in 2017, compared to about four in the early 1960s. A 2018 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report showed that the 12 sunny day floods Annapolis experienced in 2018 were as many as in all of the 34 previous years combined. Rising waters threaten buildings, city infrastructure, storm drains, septic and sewage systems, and customer traffic and tourism dollars. Petruncio says that high-tide flooding events that impact the Naval Academy often come from southerly winds acting on the bay, which can send about a foot of water up into the basin and over academy seawalls. “We see on average about 20 floods, but in 2018 there were about 40 such events at the Naval Academy. A recent article in the Capital Gazette noted that the Academy may have to consider moving to a location on higher ground. The Maryland Department of the Environment estimates that an increase of 3.7 feet also could inundate large parts of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
Away from Annapolis, rising waters threaten Maryland’s beautiful islands. Millimeter by millimeter, foot by foot, the islands of the Chesapeake Bay—including Tangier, Smith, Holland, Sharps, and Fox, among others—are disappearing or already gone. Marshland is migrating, fish and wildlife species are disappearing, and native plants— indeed, entire forests—are dying. Human infrastructure—homes, schools, businesses, cemeteries, churches, and communities—are falling into the sea that surrounds them.
Jay Fleming is a noted Annapolis area photographer who’s made the Chesapeake Bay both his passion and his inspiration. His book Working the Water, published in 2018, showcases the men and women from small island communities who make their living from crabs, oysters, fish, and the ancillary businesses that operate alongside the Bay’s seafood industries.
Fleming, who works from his studio in Maryland Hall in Annapolis, is at work on another book, an expansion of the first, that focuses especially on Smith and Tangier Islands. Both islands are facing the omnipresent impact of climate change, sea-level rise, and land subsidence. Effectively, these islands are disappearing in the space of a generation. “What’s unique about these islands is that they are the only two [populated] offshore islands in the Chesapeake Bay,” Fleming says. “This book will be about how that isolation has shaped the communities.”
A recent glimpse at some of the photos that will be used in the book are notable for their visual rendering of sea-level rise at work—shots of children riding bikes through floodwaters, of sandbars where marsh grasses once flourish, and of gravestones washed over by waves. A large cross, once a landmark for navigators and visitors, now sits in standing water at high tide, visually reminiscent of Noah watching as his lands vanish in the Biblical flood.
It’s important to note that while Fleming focuses on the two habitable islands with working communities left on the bay, the Chesapeake used to be full of small rural communities living on numerous islands. Most of these are long gone.
In his seminal book The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake Bay, Johns Hopkins oceanographer William Cronin documented a survey of more than 40 islands that have disappeared. Cronin’s historical and scientific tour outlines erosion, loss of marshland, and fragile communities the islands supported for generations. His book contains photos of Barren Island, where a sizable hunting lodge housed guests as late as the 1970s but by 1985 had become a wreck beneath the water. On Holland Island, rising water in the late-1910s forced townspeople to move their houses by barge to the mainland. Holland survived until 2010, when the last structure, a settler’s home, washed away under rising tides.
If scientific models predicting sea level rise of two feet by 2050 and three or more by 2100 are correct, Deal Island and most of Tangier Island, both of which currently sit on sand bars about five feet or less above sea level, will disappear as well. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that some 3,300 acres of Smith Island eroded over the last 150 years. Currently, only 900 acres of the island are habitable.
“To understand rapid sea-level rise anywhere in the world, stand among the scraggly, dying pines of Dorchester County along the Maryland coast,” writes Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a New York Times contributor, in his article “As Sea Levels Rise So Do Ghost Forests.” Velasquez-Manoff’s reporting describes a process that is unfolding in real-time: as sea level rises, saltwater moves in, killing first oak and other sensitive hardwoods, then loblolly pine, and eventually sweet gum. Saltwater marsh plants move in, as do impenetrable stands of Phragmites, an invasive plant. Saltwater seeps into the groundwater, polluting aquifers, killing corn and soybean fields, and rendering entire tracts of land agriculturally useless.
Saltwater incursion alone doesn’t destroy island life. Sea level rise and erosion bring visible changes to island topography that impact economies and communities: beaches move or disappear, marshes get wider, while marine channels also get wider, move, or disappear. With these tangible changes come significant human welfare concerns: the destruction of piers, jetties, and wharves; damage to homes, boats, and equipment; loss of jobs; and entire towns subsumed by the sea.
Case in point is Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, near Cambridge, Maryland. Blackwater reportedly lost 3,000 acres of forest and agricultural land between 1938 and 2006. More than 5,000 acres of marsh became open water.
Open water might be useful for kayakers and bird watchers, but it’s not ideal for the small communities that line the back roads of Dorchester County’s waterfront. In towns like Smithville, Velasquez-Manoff writes, “backyards have been gobbled up by advancing marsh, basketball courts overgrown. What were once thick stands of pine near the water’s edge have greatly thinned. The marsh now menaces a historic graveyard.”
So, what can be done about climate change, the havoc caused by rising sea levels, and the disappearance of islands in the Chesapeake? Not much says Doug Myers, Maryland Senior Scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Phillip Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis. “It’s hard to stress enough that it’s the future that will suffer from what we do right now,” Myers says. Myers and other scientists say that climate studies show sea-level rise and climate change can’t be reversed or even really impacted at all through at least 2050. “Even if we took action right now, there is a time delay in the results of reducing or removing carbon emissions, a time lag in the response of the ocean and the atmosphere so sea level will keep rising. We can impact how much sea level rise goes up this century but we are not going to change what happens through 2050,” Petruncio says. After that 2050 date, climate change can be, if not stamped out, at least successfully addressed if abating greenhouse gas emissions becomes a global priority.
For change to occur 30 years in the future, action needs to start now.
Myers says legislators need to think about what policies they are willing to take a political hit for in the short term, in order to impact the future. “There will be certain adaptations we will be forced to make in our lifetime based on climate change being already baked into the system, and I hope politicians realize that engaging in global and local efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is an important thing to do.”
Many folks look at the disappearing islands of the Chesapeake and still deny the role that climate change might have in sea level rise. They point to the contracting nature of the bay, a geological occurrence resulting from compression by a sheet of ice during the last Ice Age. Some say the Chesapeake basin is sinking, bringing the land closer to the water at the same time that the water is rising to meet it. Others point to the natural weather cycle of the planet; their position is that global warming is a natural and inevitable phenomenon. Finally, climate change naysayers point to the nearly rockless, silty nature of the Chesapeake itself to claim erosion is causing islands to sink into the bay.
The question of whether our disappearing islands are a result of climate change accelerated by human behavior or by natural processes is moot to the people who live there. They’re working tirelessly in their local communities, in the state legislature, and up to the White House to keep the last bits of beach, dock, and home, that they can. At risk are the time, talent, and treasure—the blood, sweat, and tears—that colonists, settlers, and inhabitants have invested over centuries in island communities that could be lost, gone forever.
Oceanographers and climate scientists aren’t politicians or economists, so they aren’t called upon to factor in the costs of adapting to sea level rise, migrating marshes, persistent flooding or visible erosion, much less the costs of repair after major storms. Mitigation efforts on Smith and Tangier alone have required the investment of millions of dollars from Federal, State, and local coffers. Legislators and politically active communities determine the fate of our disappearing islands not by reducing greenhouse gases or by staging strikes and summits, but by constructing breakwaters, jetties, seawalls, and stormwater valves. They hope these feats of engineering might soften the blow to what is inevitable: human vulnerability to the elements.
The questions for residents of Maryland and Virginia who pay for these projects with their taxes become as much financial as environmental: how much will we pay for sea-level rise? How will we pay to save the disappearing islands of the Chesapeake?
