That Sinking Feeling: A.M. Foley

That Sinking Feeling

by A.M. Foley

Infrastructure projects currently occupy the zeitgeist and materialize across the country, if only on drawing boards. So many of these proposals are water related that our peculiar local situation could stand another look: As you may or may not have noticed, the Eastern Shore is sinking (!), though we needn’t yet run for our lives. Our beloved land has been subsiding since the end of the Ice Age, over some 15,000 years, and is due to continue for millennia if nothing else gets us first.

Land subsidence provides island residents such as myself a front-row seat for the phenomenon, and I’m happy to report it’s not yet apparent on Elliott Island. We Islanders tend to blame erosion for intrusive tides and loss of land. Erosion can take several-foot chunks off the shoreline in one good blow, whereas sinking land and sea level rise are insidious, too-easily-denied issues, generally lumped together as “relative sea level rise.” They’ve been measured on the Eastern Shore at an annual average of 5 mm, almost twice the average elsewhere.

As the Inuit have hundreds of words for “snow,” new terms for “water” are entering our everyday vocabulary: storm surge, king