Basking with Humpbacks by McLeish Todd

Author:McLeish, Todd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPNE
Published: 2016-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Sound is an urban estuary that contains 18 trillion gallons of water covering an area of 1,320 square miles to an average depth of 64 feet and drains a watershed totaling 16,820 square miles. Six hundred miles of coastline surrounds the Sound, and 20 million people live within 50 miles of it. Although the Sound’s estimated value to the local economy tops $5.5 billion annually, it hasn’t received the respect it deserves.

In addition to teaching at UConn, Charlie Yarish is also the science co-chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Long Island Sound Study, a partnership of researchers, regulators, user groups, and others working to restore and protect the Sound by implementing a conservation and management plan that was released in 1994. Yarish calls the Sound “a very dynamic place, a system that’s constantly changing. For a couple of hundred years, it was the dominant dump for all the people who lived around its watershed. For the last twenty-five, thirty years, with all the people living in the states of Connecticut and New York finally realizing that it’s a jewel and a valuable resource, they’ve worked very hard . . . trying to manage the Sound, primarily nitrogen management, and that has had some impact. The history of the Sound is in the sediments, and if you get a good storm, [that history] moves up from the sediments and back into the water column.”

The history of Long Island Sound can be traced back to the advance of the Wisconsinan glacier, which reached Connecticut 26,000 years ago, and stopped on what is now Long Island about 21,000 years ago, where it left piles of glacial debris. In the Geologic History of Long Island Sound, geologist Ralph Lewis of the Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey wrote that “when the Wisconsinan glacier was at its maximum, sea level was about 91 meters (300 feet) lower than it is today, and the shoreline was 80 to 110 kilometers (50–70 miles) south of Long Island. By about 20,000 years ago, the glacier could no longer maintain itself at its terminal position because it was melting faster than new ice was being pushed south. As the ice front receded from its southernmost position, it stuttered and paused several times. At each of these pauses (recessional positions), it left a pile of glacial debris known as a recessional moraine . . . .

“Because this moraine stood high on the southern margin of the Long Island Sound basin, it made an ideal dam for meltwater from the glacier. As the ice continued to retreat northward, glacial Lake Connecticut formed north of the moraine dam . . . . The expanding glacial lake eventually grew to be about the same size as present-day Long Island Sound, and may have been connected with similar freshwater lakes in Block Island Sound and Buzzards Bay.” Eventually the freshwater drained out of Lake Connecticut into the sea, and then rising sea levels filled it back in with seawater. The rate of the rising sea levels slowed about 4,000 years ago, which allowed coastal wetlands to form.

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