Salt marshes, bluffs, and rising sea levels

“I have lived in Rhode Island for one week when I set out to explore the nearest tidal marsh, the landscape I know will be the first to show signs of sea level rise… It is no surprise, then, that 15 percent of Rhode Island is classified as wetlands. And of that 15 percent, roughly an eighth is tidal, both one of the most nimble types of ecosystem in the world and one of the most imperiled. Over the past two hundred years, Rhode Island lost over 50 percent of its tidal marshes to the filling and diking that come with development. Today the remaining fields of black needlerush and cordgrass are beginning to disappear thanks to higher tides and stronger storms.”
Author Elizabeth Rush opened her Facebook live event by reading from the first chapter of her book, “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore,” which discusses the tidal marshes found at Jacob’s Point near Narragansett Bay.
On Thursday, April 2, the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, in collaboration with the Rhode Island Center for the Book, hosted a live Facebook discussion with Rush. She was originally scheduled to speak in person at Salve

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