Christian Science Monitor: One reason why California needs to adapt to climate change
Just after posting, yesterday, on California’s big push to get ready to cope with climate change, I learned that at the Christian Science Monitor freelancer Douglas Fox had written a nicely complementary story: California’s sinking delta.
The story is not so much about anthropogenic climate change, but anthropo-biogeomorphological change. The huge San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta at the top and east side of San Francisco Bay, the confluence of the state’s two primary drainages, is a labyrinth of diked islands that are the opposite of standard-issue islands. These patches of dry land stick down from the water. And they are getting lower. Oxidation and microbial consumption of drying peat, Fox explains at length, does that. The place exhales CO2 and gets more vulnerable to rising sea levels all the time, he also explains at length.
It’s a heartfelt visit to a probably doomed place with broad lessons. The Tracker felt a shiver on reading the account of a biogeochemist taking a shallow bore from one islands arable soil and, just below the reach of plows, finding a packed mass of reeds. “This is 4000 years old,” the man says. Also haunting – the story’s explanation for Holland’s dikes.
- Charlie Petit
