A forest washing into the sea
Harvard Forest Director David Foster walked carefully along the bluff, his GPS unit recording his steps as he threaded among tightly packed white oaks and pitch pines that grew right to the edge, but which almost certainly wouldn’t be there for long. In the surf 20 feet below was a tangle of downed trees that days or weeks earlier had also stood on the bluff. A 2007 storm breached a nearby barrier beach and changed the ocean currents along this corner of Chappaquiddick Island. The new currents first ate away the broad beach between the forest and the sea and were now tearing at the sandy, unprotected bluffs with every high tide. “This is probably the first forest we’re going to study because there’s not much of it left,” said Foster, who will be leading a research team of fellows and students there this summer. Even to a regular visitor like Foster, the...