Sprague River Marsh- Phippsburg, Maine. White line represents study area boundary.
"A gnarled old pine marks the entrance to the Sprague River Marsh {in Phippsburg, Maine}. It is high summer, a short season of riotous green in Maine. But the tree hasn’t taken any cues from the tilting of the planet, the long hours of sunlight, or the sudden warm spike. Its branches extend, empty and bare. This pine must be at least a hundred years old, but as with so many others I saw lining the banks of tidal marshes up and down the coast, too much salt water had too regularly soaked into the ground around the tree’s root system, killing it. On the surface, a single tree might seem inconsequential. But its death is a sign of a much larger transformation—the disintegration of tidal marshes all along the coast.''
From an article by Elizabeth Rush in the magazine Guernica titled "The Marsh at the End of the World:
Wetlands are some of the world’s greatest carbon sinks, and they're starting to rot: from Maine, an investigation of an ecosystem on the brink.''
To read the article, please hit this link.
