ghost forests

10/8/19, 9(20 AMAs Sea Levels Rise, So Do Ghost Forests - The New York Times
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PLAY THE CROSSWORD Account
As Sea Levels Rise, So Do
Ghost Forests

Saltwater is killing woodlands along the East
Coast, sometimes surprisingly far from the sea.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff, a New York Times contributor, and Gabriella Demczuk, a
photographer, traveled to ghost forests in the eastern United States. Ms. Demczuk used
seawater collected at each site to create salt prints, a 19th-century technique.
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.
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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.”

In Dorchester County, where dead and dying loblolly pines stand
forlornly, Dr. Gedan has learned to “read” these forests from the
mix of species present.

As saltwater moves into the ground, oak and other sensitive
hardwoods die ﬁrst. Loblolly pine, the most salt-tolerant, is often
the last tree standing until it, too, is overwhelmed.
Then the saltwater marsh plants move in. If you’re lucky, velvety
tufts of cordgrass sprout. If not, impenetrable stands of cane-like
Phragmites, an invasive species, take over.
One reason the effects of rising seas are so noticeable here is that
the land has very little slope. Those ﬁve millimeters of sea level, a
rise that’s only slightly more than two half-dollar coins stacked, can
translate into saltwater pushing 15 feet inland per year, according
to Dr. Gedan.
Shoots of sweet gum, a tree with star-shaped leaves and bark like
alligator skin, have more tolerance for salt than other hardwoods,
such as oak. They can endure for a time as groundwater becomes
more saline.
But eventually, the sweet gum dies as well.

The Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, where Dr. Gedan does
research, lost 3,000 acres of forest and agricultural land between
1938 and 2006. More than 5,000 acres of marsh became open water.

At ﬁrst, this trend depressed Matt Whitbeck, a biologist with the
Fish and Wildlife Service who works at the refuge. Saltwater
marshes are important nurseries for the ﬁsh and crabs people like
to eat.
But in 2012, he realized the marsh wasn’t entirely disappearing; it
was migrating. Some of the 3,000 acres of forest that the refuge had
lost had transformed into saltwater marsh.
His outlook changed. “We need to think about where the marsh is
moving, not where it is,” he said.
But in nearby Smithville, a historically African American town, this
movement poses an existential threat. 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.

Residents have battled the advancing wetlands for years, said
Roslyn Watts, 60, who grew up here. All that time, she and her
neighbors thought the inexorable advance was simply the price of
living near water’s edge.

But in 2010, she learned about global warming and sea level rise,
she said. She understood that what was happening wasn’t entirely
natural.
“I was angry,” she said, and particularly incensed by the idea that
retreat was the only workable strategy. The Dutch didn’t retreat,
she said. They built dikes. Why couldn’t Smithville?
“These families have been here since at least the late 19th century,”
she said. “There’s a connection to the land.”

But Smithville, small and with few resources, has little money to
adapt.

Further south in Somerset County, numerous “for sale” signs stand
in front of houses along the back roads. Some are abandoned, their
yards overgrown by Phragmites. On Deal Island, ditches once dug
to drain the land for farming and to help manage flooding from
high tides now stand full of stagnant water.
Today, in fact, these ditches are part of the threat: Instead of
draining water out to sea, they can accelerate the movement of
saltwater inland, said Kate Tully, an agroecologist at the University
of Maryland.
In general, saltwater can seep into the soil before sea level rise
becomes obvious in other ways, killing sensitive plants far from the
shore. “We call it the invisible flood, because you can’t really see it,”
she said.
Elizabeth van Dolah, an anthropologist at the University of
Maryland who works with rural communities along the eastern
shore, noted that residents here are accustomed to marsh
migration and flooding. “But they’re probably seeing it happening
at a much quicker pace than in the past,” she said.
“Many of them recognize that, yes, they eventually have to leave.
But for the time being, they intend to stay in place.”

Bob Fitzgerald, 80, has farmed near the town Princess Anne his
whole life. Driving the back roads in his four-seater pickup, he
pointed out ﬁelds that, just ﬁve years ago, grew corn but have since
become too salty for crops.

“You can’t give property away down here,” he said.
The asphalt roads are occasionally tinted red along the edges.
That, too, is an effect of the ﬂoodwater “over-topping” the roads,
Mr. Fitzgerald said.
“People who have built their homes here are damn fools,” he said,
speaking near a place where pine trees appear to be dying around
a house. “It should have been abandoned.”
As the years pass, he said, it will be.
‘Cedar cemeteries’ in New Jersey

For 33 years, Ken Able has walked the same causeway almost daily
at the Rutgers University Marine Field Station in Tuckerton, N.J.
In that time he has seen marsh become open water, and the fish
population transform as cooler-water species decline and those
that thrive in warmer waters move in.
Blue crab and summer flounder, both saltwater species, have
pushed into freshwater rivers. Their arrival suggests the
waterways are becoming saltier further inland.
All these signs of change come from the ocean, a fluid and often
fickle environment. Which is why Dr. Able, a professor emeritus of
marine and coastal sciences, so appreciates the ghost forests.
They’re a signal of change from a stationary source: the trees
themselves.
“A ghost forest is a way to capture geological history,” he said.
“There’s not always a way to do that.”

The Atlantic white cedar, abundant around the Mullica River
Estuary in stands such as this one, is an unusually durable
parchment on which to capture that history.

Long prized for lumber, its wood is highly resistant to rot. But the
tree is also very sensitive to salt. It can tolerate maybe three salty
high tides before succumbing.
So when the trees begin dying, it’s a trustworthy indicator that
conditions are becoming more saline. It is an age-old phenomenon,
now happening faster.
Erosion of marshes and riverbanks has also accelerated, revealing
buried cedar stumps from prehistoric ghost forests. Jennifer
Walker, a frequent collaborator with Dr. Able who recently earned
her Ph.D. in oceanography at Rutgers, dated one stump here to the
ﬁfth century. “Cedar cemeteries,” she calls these places.

As elsewhere, ghost forest formation seems to have sped up
recently, particularly after Hurricane Sandy hit the region in 2012.
“It’s a good example of a slowly encroaching process — and then
storms making it worse,” Dr. Walker said.

She is studying sediment cores from salt marshes and dating
ancient, dead cedars in order to reconstruct sea level rise and
ghost forest formation through time.
The pace of sea level rise ﬁrst quickened in the late 19th century
after the Industrial Revolution, Dr. Walker said, and then sped up
again in recent decades. It’s now rising faster than at any point in
the past several thousand years.
Much of the Mullica River Estuary is a nature preserve, its many
tributaries remote and undeveloped. But since 2015, Dr. Able and
Dr. Walker have taken a series of helicopter rides over the area.
“It’s not one giant ghost forest,” Dr. Walker said. “But the more you
look, the more you ﬁnd them.”
From above, they’ve seen swaths of dead trees along riverbanks
many miles from the open ocean, suggesting that Sandy pushed
seawater far up the river system.
“You get a slug of saltwater,” Dr. Able said, “and things die.”
On the North Carolina coast, fires and salt

Paul Taillie, a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University,
encountered a mystery: He wanted to know how quickly ghost
forests form. So he repeated a study originally done 15 years
earlier to see how plant life had changed over time.
As expected, saltwater marsh had advanced. Pond pine and other
salt-sensitive trees were dying. Salt-tolerant plants, including
sawgrass and black needle rush, were moving in.
But unexpectedly, the change wasn’t occurring evenly across the
landscape. Trees were dying faster in some places than others.
What could explain this uneven emergence of ghost forests?

The study area had almost no slope — much of it was just inches
above sea level — and the minor differences in elevation couldn’t
explain the variation.

But a clue came from the soil. It tended to be saltier where trees
were dying fastest.
The explanation Dr. Taillie, who’s now a post-doctoral researcher at
the University of Florida, landed on had to do with drought. When
droughts hit, the amount of freshwater emptying into the ocean
from nearby rivers declines, making near-shore waters saltier in
some places.
That saltier water then pushes inland unevenly, killing trees in an
irregular pattern across an otherwise mostly uniform landscape.
“It’s not just rising sea level” that creates ghost forests, Dr. Tallie
said, but periods of dryness.
“It’s more during times of drought, when you have less freshwater,
that the saltwater creeps in,” he said. “Salinity goes up.”

Wildﬁres are another accelerant.
Wetlands burn naturally here during dry years. Fires often travel
on top of standing water, consuming grass and trees that rise above
the muck.

In the past, young trees quickly sprouted after fires. But recently,
some forests have failed to recover.
“There’s almost no regeneration,” Chris Moorman, a disturbance
ecologist at North Carolina State University, said as we surveyed
an expanse of dead, mostly branchless trees. He and Dr. Taillie said
they think that wetlands like these have become too salty for young
pond pines, which are more sensitive to salt than mature ones.
They can’t gain a foothold in marshes their own forebears could
tolerate.
Drought is predicted to become more frequent as the climate
warms, Dr. Taillie said. That means wildfires, combined with
intensified dry spells and amplified saltwater intrusion may,
together, accelerate the formation of ghost forests independently of
sea level rise.
The synergy of fire and salt produces particularly dramatic ghost
forests. Along the Chesapeake Bay, stands of trees might gradually
thin near open water, until just a few scraggly pines remain. But in
some places here, acre upon acre of dead trees, sun-bleached and
occasionally fire-blackened, stand sentinel over bubbling marshes.
Yet while the ghost forests may evoke graveyards, the salt marsh
plants that advance into dead and dying stands of trees are
themselves valuable. Marshes provide homes for birds; they serve
as nurseries for young fish and other sea creatures.
And as the sea advances, the new marshes also provide a
momentary buffer against the rising tide — protecting the forests
whose time has not yet come.

About the photographs
Gabriella Demczuk collected salt water at each of the ghost forest locations. She used the
water to make salt prints, a technique that combines saltwater and silver nitrate to make photo
paper sensitive to light.
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