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The Disappearing Islands of the Chesapeake

Amazon.com Price:  $34.74 (as of 12/04/2019 10:23 PST- Details)

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Description

Scientists estimate that, until 1900, the water level of the Chesapeake Bay rose at the rate of three feet each and every thousand years. Alarmingly enough, the bay rose by one foot in the twentieth century by myself, and for evidence of this dramatic change one need only observe the effects of rising water on the islands of the Chesapeake Bay, which slowly are slipping from sight.

A retired oceanographer who first conducted research on the bay in the 1950s, William B. Cronin here supplies a survey of the changing fortunes of these forty-atypical islands, from Garrett in the north to Gwynn and James islands to the south. Cronin’s historical and scientific tour outlines their erosion, their loss of marshland, and the wealthy if changing human experience they’ve supported for generations. He draws on imagery that includes the work of celebrated local photographer A. Aubrey Bodine, colonial and state records, newspaper pieces, and his own personal and professional experience.

Historic nautical charts, in comparison to current data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, leave without a doubt of the crisis most of the islands face. On one, Holland, rising water in the late 1910s forced townspeople to move their houses by barge to the mainland. On some other, Barren, a sizable hunting lodge housed guests as late as the 1970s but by 1985 had grow to be a wreck beneath the water. An appendix documents the many small islands that have dropped entirely from view since the seventeenth century.


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