Nature Notes: Looking Into the Future
I started this environmental and natural history column in 1981, and except for about four years in the latter part of the 1980s it has been going ever since. I hope to keep it going on into the 2020s. We will see. Nature and the environment are in a lot of trouble and need all of the help they can get. Who wants to live on Mars?
We start out the New Year with the semblance of a typical January, less snow. But my itching knee tells me that after a week of very cold weather, January will become almost as warm as December 2015. We will see.
Global warming is not a new phenomenon. Our world in these latitudes has seen bitter cold and tropical warmth alternate several times in the more than four billion years the earth has been around. Only 20,000 years ago, sea level was so low that one (if around and bipedal) could walk to Block Island, a big chunk of glacial till consisting of boulders, rocks, stones, sand, and clay that represents the forward edge of the last glaciation before its retreat. Shelter, Robins, Gardiner’s, Plum, Big, and Little Gull Islands, as well as Fishers Island, Nantucket, and North Haven were all connected to each other by dry land.
The sea level rise has been ongoing for at least 10,000 years, but only lately has it been accelerating as the earth warms up at a spectacularly fast pace. Those abovementioned islands have long been isolated by rising seas, otherwise, Gardiner’s and the others would have a similar complement of mammals as we have on mainland Long Island. Field mice, or voles, perhaps, even a species distinct from our own two here on the East End existed on Big Gull Island but have been absent for the last 30 years or so. How they got there in the first place is still a mystery.
The trees and shrubs of Nantucket and Gardiner’s, Robins, and Fishers Islands are similar in species composition to the ones in East Hampton and Southampton, suggesting that some of them came before the animals that later populated them. During the warming up following the retreat of the last glacier we lost a few northern tree species — the larch, hemlock, aspen, and two spruces, red and black.
On the other hand, southern trees such as the tupelo and pitch pine moved in to take their place and are still arriving and establishing today, to wit, three magnolia species that Andrew Greller, a botanist, has recorded on western Long Island, along with a red bud on Gardiner’s Island, catalpas, and southern red oaks. It’s always hard to tell, however, which established here after escaping from cultivation and which got here on their own.
Global warming cannot be used to account for the rise locally of harbor seals and other seal species, great black-back gulls, great cormorants, and several other species which arrived and established here from the north rather than from the south. Wild animals and native plants are capable of adapting to different climes and substrates either by ecophenotypic development or evolution. They are always in a state of flux, one way or another.
A few little islands, for example Hicks Island between Gardiner’s Bay and Napeague Harbor, formed during early settler times. A few, like Star Island in Lake Montauk and Brushy Island in Fort Pond, probably were here during the Native American occupation.
Hicks Island is one of those that switches back and forth from an island to a tombolo. After the 1938 hurricane it reconnected to Promised Land, then became an island again after the filled-in former inlet was re-dredged by Suffolk County in the 1950s.
More than 3,000 years ago, Montauk was an island, Gardiner’s Bay was continuous with the Atlantic Ocean. As pitch pines marched from west to east after arriving on Long Island, they were stopped in their tracks by this sea barrier. Finally the channel between ocean and bay was closed by sediments washing out of Montauk’s bluffs, carried by the Block Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean on the north and south sides by the littoral drift currents running westerly, and then ultimately dropped on Napeague so that one could walk across from one side to the other without getting wet feet.
What will be Long Island’s new shape once global warming has raised sea level by a meter or more, say by 2075? Sammy’s Beach will be mostly under water, Penny Sedge Island in the northeast corner of Three Mile Harbor will be gone. Wood Tick Island in Accabonac Harbor will be a mere nub without trees. Brushy Island in Fort Pond will be a shoal never to raise out of the water again. There will be no Little Reed and Big Reed Ponds east of Lake Montauk, only a “Bigger Reed Pond.” Hook Pond in East Hampton Village will reach all the way to Ocean Avenue on the west and flood much of the Maidstone Club golf course on the east. Georgica Pond will cross Montauk Highway on the north.
Whoever is then governor of New York State will propose a new east-west multilane bypass connecting Southampton and East Hampton Towns. Halt the Highway III will rise up to stop it, and the author of “Nature Notes” will be 140 years old.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].