The week before the now-named “Patriot’s Day Storm,” freshly printed maps of Chappaquiddick arrived at The Trustees of Reservations’ offices. The maps were obsolete before even making it out of the box. Norton Point Beach hadn’t survived the storm intact. Pounding waves and high tides, egged on by an insistent wind, chiseled a significant divide through the sand. After the storm, people were warned to stay off the sand banks surrounding the breach, as the water rushing through was liable to rip away another swath of land. The currents in Edgartown harbor intensified, to the dismay of public safety officials, and the tides changed dramatically. The perimeter of the Island of Martha’s Vineyard had effectively shrunk by twelve miles. The umbilical cord was cut; one island became two.

Norton Point Beach was a two-and-a-half-mile sliver of barrier beach, which prior to April 16, 2007, separated Katama Bay from the Atlantic Ocean and connected Chappaquiddick to Martha’s Vineyard proper. It has endured other significant breaches in the past, each time closing naturally. The healing process has remained consistent: The hole migrates east until it moves so far east that it hits the main body of Chappaquiddick. Expectations remain high that this breach will eventually mend as well.

But what if it doesn’t? What if the Island’s shape is forever altered?

Martha’s Vineyard has a unique physique. She’s a head turner. Easy to spot on a map, the Island looks like a squiggly lined triangle that is being gently nudged to the right. Or is it that she looks like a nascent wave before breaking? Or perhaps she’s shaped like a pregnant woman merrily floating on her back. A journalist for a national magazine once likened the shape of Martha’s Vineyard to General George Washington’s hat.

Whatever one sees, hers is a silhouette that launched a thousand T-shirts, trinkets, etchings, hand-woven baskets, and dangly earrings. But her looks won’t last forever. Sadly, erosion and the side effects of global warming will see to that.

The south side of the Island is used to the beatings. The rate of land recession is generally between five and eleven feet a year. Startled landowners have witnessed their property literally crumbling away in front of them. Edward Swenson purchased fifty acres in the Wequobsque Cliff area in Chilmark in the 1950s; by the mid-1980s, he had only twenty-five acres left. In 1934, Chilmark seasonal resident Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and a Windy Gates property owner, along with some of his friends started recording the rate of recession. By 1972, their records showed a whopping loss of 191 feet and 9 inches.

In an article about erosion seven years ago, the Vineyard Gazette spoke with contractor Michael Carroll about several house-moving jobs. One story, in particular, stands out as an example of how fast things can change. Carroll told the Gazette that in the fall of 1977 his company was hired to move a house. “When we started working, the house was thirty-five feet from the cliff. When we took our lunch breaks we used to watch the cliffs, and you could see them gradually giving way.” They were ready to move the house a few months later, but nature intervened with the news-making Blizzard of ’78. After the thaw they returned to the job site and found the house sticking out eight feet over the cliffs. In spite of its precarious perch, Carroll’s crew was able to move it.

According to geologists, it wasn’t long ago that the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard extended an entire mile farther than it does today. That’s approximately a fifteen-minute walk from the dunes, positioned as they are today, to the water’s edge. Of course, it should be noted that geologist years are a bit like dog years in reverse. A hundred years to a geologist is nothing. A thousand years seems like yesterday, and even fifteen thousand years really wasn’t terribly long ago. That means it wasn’t terribly long ago that the south side of the Island stretched out some fifty to sixty miles more than it does today.

The magnificent red- and yellow-hued clay that has given the Gay Head Cliffs their notoriety started dropping into the water thousands of years ago, but recorders of recent history have witnessed the heartbreaking fall of the sandy sunset into the sea. Tourists still flock up to Aquinnah to cliff gaze, but for many longtime Vineyarders, the cliffs’ true glory days have washed away.

Erosion is a culprit that has found an ally in global warming. It’s likely that storms of increasing severity will hasten the shoreline’s retreat. In addition, it’s widely believed that global warming is expediting glacial and polar ice melt, which means the sea level is rising faster and faster.

Look around. Parts of Martha’s Vineyard are only feet above sea level today. Recent projections target Edgartown as the first town to submerge. In less than a hundred years, you might be strolling down South Water Street in a kayak. A hundred years – nothing in geologist years. In fact, it doesn’t seem like a terribly long time in our years either.

What can we expect? What can be done? We asked four Vineyard experts for their opinions. Here are excerpts from those interviews:

Bob Woodruff
Biologist and Executive Director, Great Pond Foundation

Is it true that thousands of years ago, Martha’s Vineyard wasn’t an Island?

During the height of the glaciation, say twenty thousand years ago, you could have walked from Chatham – a hundred miles due east – on the bare ground. The whole area south of the Vineyard extended sixty miles before you got to the edge of the sea, and every great pond on the Island was bone dry. Those ponds on the south side of the Island would not exist except that sea level is the height that it is today. In a short period of time, geologically speaking, the last fifteen thousand years, the sea level has risen three hundred feet.

What happened at Lucy Vincent Beach over the winter?

The most dramatic thing that occurred this winter is the loss of a huge chunk of cemented gravel. Here stood this tall, maybe fifty feet or more, formation. A big chunk of that came down, which weighed, I don’t know, fifty or one hundred tons. It came down in a split second.

Was this unusual?

The Island is shrinking every day. The beaches are eroding at a fairly rapid clip. Up at Lucy Vincent, Wequobsque Cliff area, the beach is receding at a rate of around six to seven feet a year. In any given storm, it might lose two or three feet, but the long-range average is about six or seven feet. The northwest coast is being attacked by northwest winds: strong, cold-front, high-pressure winds. The northwest shore is fairly armored with boulders, clay cliffs, and some sandy areas as well. And the sandy areas, like Makonikey, are likely to erode more rapidly than Cedar Tree Neck or Menemsha Hills. The northeast side, from East Chop to Edgartown, is attacked by northeast winds in storms, and those can be more punishing than the northwest wind. And State Beach and Sengekontacket are severely under attack by those northeast winds. The only thing that keeps State Beach from eroding more seriously are the rock groins that stick out to catch sand, but they are inefficient in a sense because of the armoring of the whole East Chop bluff, with rock beneath the bluffs there to prevent East Chop from disappearing. By the way, on the seaward side of the road at East Chop, there were once croquet courts.

What do you predict for the future?

The increased frequency, which is predicted, and the increased intensity of any given storm, coupled with global warming, is going to be a major factor
and already has been for some time in causing an increase in the rate of erosion. I think in the next ten or twenty years, we’ll up the recession rate at Wasque from eleven feet to fifteen feet. At Lucy Vincent, we can look for that to go from six or seven feet to ten feet a year.

Chris Kennedy
Islands Regional Director, The Trustees of Reservations

Why do so many people believe that the breach at Norton Point will close naturally?

What happens is that over a course of a ten- to fifteen-year period of time, this breach begins to migrate slowly to the east, and it will eventually reconnect with the cliffs at Wasque Point. Will it be five years from now, fifteen years? I’m not sure, but it’s virtually guaranteed. You look at all of the major breaches, and there have been four major breaches since the mid-1800s, and all of them have acted the same way. Some were a little bit farther to the west, some a little to the east, but all of them healed the same way. The opening migrated slowly, until it finally attached at Wasque Point. The reason for it is because if you look at how sand is transported on the south side of the Island, all the sand moves from west to east. So as sand builds up on the westernmost end of the breach and the current erodes the easternmost end, the opening just naturally migrates to the east.

Is the south shore of the Island changing the most?

You can absolutely guarantee what’s happening, which is the south shore is moving north. If you look at some of the historic maps of the south shore of the Island, we know that over two hundred years’ period of time, it’s been moving northward on an average of about fifteen feet per year. Some places are a lot less. Other places are a lot more. Places like Wasque tend to be very dynamic. It’s not unusual to see a change of thirty to fifty feet in the course of one year. You can’t just stand here and see that progression moving northward, because what happens is that you lose some of that beach and then three or four months from now it accretes back. But the slow progress northward has been well documented over the past two centuries; many of our south shore ponds are being pinched off as that barrier beach moves farther to the north.

Will the beaches on the south side of the Island wash away?

The great thing about barrier beaches is you don’t lose them. The beach is moving northward though. Eventually what happens is you won’t have a great pond per se, you’ll have the various remnant coves.

Will you venture to guess about the shape of the Island in the future?

The shape of the Island, I don’t know if it will really change that much just because of erosion. Global warming will certainly have a substantial impact on the shape of the Island. We’ve all seen those projections of a twelve-inch rise in sea level. For instance in Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, that will probably have more of a profound effect on the shape of the Island over the next hundred to five hundred years than will the natural erosion that we’ve seen for the past two hundred years. I think man will continue to change the appearance of the Island as we develop the Island and we become more involved in intensive land management. We will see some geological changes from natural phenomenon as well as man-made phenomenon.

Dr. Charles Ratté
Former State Geologist for Vermont Vineyard resident since 1997

What have you seen happening, geologically speaking?

The south shore, of course, is the biggest threat to the Island. It has a very unique geology in the sense that it is a series of layers of fine sands and clays, and the clays unfortunately underlie the sand. The sand is very porous, and when we get heavy rain, that rainwater will seep down through the sandy layers and it will rest on the top of the clay layers. Over time, clay will absorb a lot of water, but it does not release the water very readily, so at some moment, there is a triggering event, like an extra heavy rainstorm, and the triggering event will cause that clay to mobilize. With the weight and water in the sand, it squirts out toward the area of least resistance, which is toward the ocean. I think it was about 2003, there was a big landslide in the vicinity of the Windy Gates area, in which the clay actually moved under the beach and raised the beach about fifteen feet in the air and then it squirted out over the beach. And that brought down quite a lot of the overlying sand. So that’s one kind of landslide that is rather unique to this area.

The other problem, of course, is the undercutting by waves, which undercut the bottom of the cliffs, and then they have no support and they simply slump down. It doesn’t take long for the waves to wash that material away, and you’d never know it was there.

So the Island is shrinking?

The fortunate thing is that there is a portion of the Island that is accreting, or growing, and that is the east end of the Island, where you’re getting the sandy material carried by the long shore currents to the east and building up the beaches in the east.

Do you have any predictions?

A hundred years from now, probably not an awful lot will be different than it is now. My suspicions are that the homes that are in and along the current Moshup Trail [in Aquinnah] will be coastline in a hundred years. People who are in the Katama area are protected somewhat by the dunes, but those
dunes are not going to last. Probably in a hundred years, the coastline will be somewhere in the vicinity of Mattakesett.

What should people do?

The nice thing about this Island is that there is information available all the time. When people come to the Island, they should inquire a little bit before they get excited about living on the coast and having a nice view of the ocean. I think we’re very fortunate on this Island to have people who are very interested in cutting down on the consumption of fossil fuels, which puts an awful lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. One little Island isn’t going to make a great deal of difference, but we could be a model.

Jo-Ann Taylor
Coastal Planner and District of Critical Planning Concern Coordinator, Martha’s Vineyard Commission
            
What kinds of solutions are there?

People have to understand that we live with erosion. As far as protecting the Island, I think most people think of structural solutions. That has a very limited value, aside from right around the harbors. I think most often, when private-property owners see an erosion problem, they immediately jump to the conclusion of, “Well, I have to put up a sea wall or I have to do something.” And often they won’t listen when I try to tell them, “That emerald green lawn right out to the edge of the bluff might have something to do with your erosion problem.” By overly managing the landscape at the edge of the bluff, you’ll get accelerated runoff, as opposed to what happens when you have a natural buffer. A buffer of natural vegetation that is close to the bluff is going to behave differently when it rains and snows. So ideally, you want a natural buffer, but often people don’t want to hear that.

What’s the problem with structural solutions?

There are people that just immediately jump to the conclusion that a structural solution is going to save everything. They want to hear, “You can put a sea wall there and it will protect it.” There are very limited situations where structural solutions are going to help. There are places where it’s just not possible. I mean, you can put something out there, but it’s not going to do any good. There are other places where it just doesn’t have the cost benefit. And other places where permitting a structural solution is basically a horror. So there are just very limited applications where it would be good to use a structural solution.

What are homeowners supposed to do?

I think the best service we can provide to people is to encourage them not to build in certain places. I know right after a storm, like after Hurricane Bob, people were just frantic to rebuild, and I don’t think that helps with any of the long range. If you’re the one that has the waterfront property, you don’t want to lose it. You don’t want to hear that it’s going to disappear. I think people should understand that when they choose where to live. It’s a tough thing and especially where there is not enough public access to beaches on the Island. Education is important for homeowners and potential property owners as well as for the community.

How can we best plan for the future?

We need to have long-range thinking, like where do we want to put Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank property? Where do we want ownership of open space?
It’s something that we as a community should talk about. We need the luxury of doing the long-range kind of planning that we’re doing with the Island Plan [www.islandplan.com] about where we should be encouraging development and where we shouldn’t.

Shoreline images were compiled by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission in June 2007 using 2005 aerial photos provided by MassGIS and shoreline data provided by the Coastal Zone Management 2002 Shoreline Change Project. Positional accuracy is +/- 28 feet.