The Future Chesapeake: Shaping the Future

By J.R. Schubel

The Chesapeake Bay is the nation’s largest estuary. After slow deterioration for several centuries, the Chesapeake Bay Program was launched in 1983 to restore it.

After spending more than $24 billion, the results of the restoration program are disappointing.

The Bay Program has arrested the decline of the Bay, but it has failed to achieve its restoration goals—something that will become more challenging with climate change.

The rate of environmental change today is more rapid than at any time in the history of humanity. The concept of restoration—to return to an earlier time and condition—is an outmoded concept for coastal ecosystems like the Chesapeake Bay that are at the leading edge of change.

A better strategy would be to focus on shaping the future Bay. While we cannot create the future Bay, we have many of the tools to shape it, tools that have never been used as a complement to existing efforts.

Learn about the past and present of the Bay, how climate change will affect its future, and how we can intervene to shape the future of the Chesapeake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665704397

J.R. Schubel

J. R. Schubel has worked throughout his career at the interfaces of coastal science-management-policy. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where he became associate director of its Chesapeake Bay Institute. He has published widely on the Chesapeake Bay and wrote and illustrated The Living Chesapeake.  He left Johns Hopkins to become dean of Stony Brook University’s Marine Sciences Research Center.  For three of his twenty years at Stony Brook, he served as provost. He holds the title of Stony Brook distinguished service professor emeritus. He is president emeritus of the New England Aquarium and the Aquarium of the Pacific.

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Copyright © 2021 J. R. Schubel.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-0440-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0441-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0439-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021908746

Archway Publishing rev. date: 05/04/2021

For Margaret, Susan,

Kathryn, and Ayla

Acknowledgments

M y interest in the Chesapeake Bay goes back to my graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in the 1960s and to my mentor, the late Dr. Donald W. Pritchard. That interest has never waned. Pritchard’s commitment to adaptive management using the best science had a very important influence on me. I thank the following for their review of the manuscript and for their corrections and important and helpful suggestions: William Boicourt, William Eichbaum, Tom Horton, Thomas Cronin, Tavit Najarian, Joseph DiLorenzo, Donald Scavia, and Grace Brush. All have made major contributions to our understanding of the Bay and our efforts to rehabilitate it. I thank my daughters, Susan and Kathryn, for their suggestions. Kathryn read the last few drafts and provided important technical and editorial advice. I particularly thank my wife, Margaret, for her careful reading of the numerous drafts with me, improving each one, and for her love and support. I thank Paul Hostetler for creating the cover and all but one of the figures, and Alice Hsieh for creating figure 5. The overall design benefitted from the creative suggestions of Thomas Grimm.

Contents

Introduction

Origin of the Chesapeake Bay

Regional Setting

The Physics of the System

Sea Level Rise: Past, Present, and Future

Other Major Effects of Climate Change on the Region That Will Affect Chesapeake Bay

The Gradual Deterioration of the Bay

A Framework for Action: The Chesapeake Bay Program

Tracking Progress in Cleaning Up the Bay

The Cost of Restoration

Would Adaptive Management Have Been a Better Model?

What Is the Bay Worth and What Are the Costs of a Clean Bay?

Restoration Has Failed: We Need a New Strategy

A Tool Kit for Shaping the Future Bay

The Bay’s Living Resources in a Changing Climate

Wicked Problems

Dealing With Wicked Problems

Concluding Thoughts and a Proposed Way Forward

Appendix A

Glossary

Selected References

Introduction

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

—George Bernard Shaw

E very book should have a purpose. The primary purpose of this book is to explore what will happen to the Chesapeake Bay in the future and to present thoughts on how we can shape that future. The Chesapeake Bay has long been my favorite estuary. I studied it for many years and completed my doctoral dissertation on it, but that was long ago, and a lot has happened to the Bay since then. During much of that time, I have been intimately involved with other bays and estuaries in this country and abroad, but never losing touch with the Chesapeake Bay.

The operative words in the title of this book are Future Chesapeake. The challenge is captured in the subtitle: Shaping the Future. The future Chesapeake Bay will be determined through a combination of nature and human action. With creativity, imagination, vision, and bold intervention, we have the power, if not to create the future Chesapeake Bay, at least to shape it so that it will meet many of the desires and expectations of humans and be a bay coherent with nature’s processes that will be significantly different from today because of climate change.

In researching recent literature in preparation for this book, I felt like a ball in a pinball machine being bounced from one hot link to the next, nearly all dealing with a single issue, most dated but not all. I kept hoping that if I played long enough, the machine would light up with music and announce that I had hit the jackpot and found a summary of the current status of the Bay, the prospects for the future, and an assessment of what would determine the future. I never did. That is what I attempt to do in this brief book.

There are powerful lessons from the past. Throughout the last few million years the Chesapeake Bay has come and gone with swings in sea level. It has changed shape and position and has sometimes disappeared entirely with extreme drops in sea level during glacial epochs only to return with the next upward swing of sea level during warm interglacial periods.

There are many things about the future Bay that are not predictable, but many of the forces that will shape the future Bay are predictable within relatively large bands of uncertainty. While we can’t control many of these driving forces, we can plan and create a bay coherent with them and that has many of the qualities of the recent Bay that we cherish and are trying to recapture. In this book, we look at the past, the desired future, and how to shape the Bay to be coherent with that desired future. It will require supplementing our existing efforts to restore the Bay with a new focus on the future using new approaches.

We start with the lessons from the past. To understand how the Bay will evolve, one must have some understanding of how the Bay was formed, how it operates, particularly its physical processes—the motion and mixing of its waters—its relationship to swings of sea level, and its biological processes.¹ Then we focus on the sustained effort to restore the Bay to its past glory, an expensive effort that has fallen far short of producing the desired results but one that has surely kept the Bay from deteriorating further. Finally, I offer a complementary approach that I believe has a better chance of creating a bay for the future that will have many of the qualities we have been trying to restore.

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Figure 1. Map of the Chesapeake Bay region

showing locations described in this book

Origin of the Chesapeake Bay

The Earliest Beginnings

T he location of the present Chesapeake Bay was determined by the collision of a large meteor—a bolide—that crashed into what is now the eastern shore of Virginia about 35 million years ago. This was near the end of the geologic epoch known as the Eocene Epoch, which extended from about 56 million years ago to about 34 million years ago. It was a period characterized by a wide range of climates. It started with one of the warmest periods in Earth’s history, a time when there was little or no ice anywhere on the planet, and ended in a glacial period. The warm period, the so-called thermal maximum, started about 56 million years ago. The massive release of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) to the atmosphere from extensive volcanism lasted only 20,000–50,000 years, and the entire warm period lasted only about 200,000 years, but the effects were profound. The earth’s average temperature increased by 9–14°F during this geologically brief warm period, which was followed by an ice age.

At the time the meteor crashed into the future eastern shore of Virginia, the Eocene was nearing the end of the temperature maximum. The climate was several degrees warmer than today, and sea level was perhaps 300 feet higher than today, drowning much of the region that would later become the lower reaches of Chesapeake Bay. The collision punched a crater, the Exmore Crater, more than 50 miles across and nearly a mile deep. Its total area was twice the size of Rhode Island and nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon. It is the largest known impact crater in the United States. The crater influenced the courses of regional rivers for many millions of years, and probably the eventual location of the valley that holds the modern Chesapeake Bay.

Some 300,000 to 500,000 years ago, the Susquehanna discharged to the ocean through the southern portion of the Delmarva Peninsula, and some 150,000 years ago took a course even farther south through the Delmarva Peninsula. These tracks were documented using seismic profiling by the Chesapeake Bay Institute and later with more comprehensive studies by the Maryland Geological Survey.

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Figure 2. Paleo-channels of the Susquehanna River

150,000 and 300,000 years ago.

Origin of the Modern Chesapeake Bay

The modern Chesapeake Bay was produced by the most recent rise of sea level, which began about 18,000 years ago, marking the end of the most recent glacial epoch of the Pleistocene. Eighteen thousand years ago sea level was nearly 400 feet lower than today. The edge of the Atlantic Ocean lay beyond the edge of the continental shelf, some 125 miles seaward of the present mouth of the Bay. Lush vegetation covered this broad sandy plain. Meadows, freshwater marsh grasses, and climax forests of boreal conifers, hemlock, and northern hardwoods flourished—trees that today are abundant only much farther north. The luxuriant vegetation supported large herbivores that roamed the continental shelf. Ancient elephants—mammoths and mastodons—bison, musk oxen, horses, and tapir ranged over a region that, in only a few thousand years, would be submerged beneath the ocean. Fossil elephant bones and teeth dredged from the continental shelf between Georges Bank and the Chesapeake Bay today are the only reminders that these great beasts once trod through forests and meadows where fish now swim.

For the previous 100,000 years or more, a subarctic climate gripped what would become Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. Winters were long, harsh, and wet, summers short and cool. The mean annual temperature was 20°F colder than it is today. Sea level had been falling for most of that period. Air masses laden with moisture from the warmer oceans were chilled as they spread over the colder continents, and the moisture was wrung out of them to fall on the land as snow. Through the long, frigid winters, the snow piled up deeper and deeper on the land. Some melted every summer and returned to the sea, but less than had been added the winter before. Sea level continued to drop. As the snow accumulated, it slowly changed to ice as the weight of the increasing pack bore down on it. Year by year, the sheet had grown and thickened. Long ago, the pressure had become so great that the ice sheet began to flow and spread.

The North American ice sheet extended from the Arctic Circle all the way to the headwaters of the Susquehanna in what would become New York and Pennsylvania. The area that was to become Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia was free of glacial ice, but not of its effects.

821297Fig320201122.tif

Figure 3. Maximum extent of glaciers during most recent glaciation.

By 18,000 years ago, climate had begun to warm, and the glaciers began to retreat. Meltwater ran from the toe of the glacier, first in countless rivulets, then in larger streams, and finally into the mighty Susquehanna as it raced to the sea. Getting back its own, the sea began to rise.

By 15,000 years ago, the sea had climbed out of its oceanic basin and begun its relentless march across the continental shelf, drowning everything in its path—forests, coastal wetlands, and even settlements of Native Americans who first inhabited the area 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.² Native Americans probably