RIPPLE MARKS—The Story Behind the Story

Author | Stories and First Paragraphs | Full Article | Citation

Author

Cheryl Lyn Dybas, a contributing writer for Oceanography, is a marine scientist and policy analyst by training. She also writes about the seas for The Washington Post, BioScience, Natural History, Canadian Geographic, Africa Geographic, and many other publications.

Top

Stories and First Paragraphs

Siberia on the Chesapeake: Winter Storms Foretell Changes in Chesapeake Waterfowl Populations

A preternatural quiet has fallen over the land. Our breathing is the only sound. On this cold snap of a February day, even exhaled air is quickly stilled, flash-frozen into ice crystals. Wind-whipped snows rest in six-foot-high banks that stretch for miles. We might be in Siberia.

Suddenly, not in Russia but in Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay, a hushed world springs to life. Hundreds of lesser snow geese, their wings white-on-white against the deep snows, take flight from a nearby field, startled, perhaps, by our presence. Lesser snow geese breed in summer in Siberia and other High Arctic locales. The geese leave the Far North before the first blizzard, to drift down and settle for the winter along the normally snow-free mid- and South Atlantic coast.

"But they, and we, were in for a big surprise this season," says Suzanne Baird, manager of Maryland's Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the Chesapeake. The 26,000-acre refuge serves as wintering grounds for vast numbers of waterfowl—in most years. In February 2010, snowfall shattered all records in the mid-Atlantic region. "Over the past two weeks alone, we've been buried under more than 50 inches," says Baird, climbing atop a snow pile to look at refuge conditions. "Many of the geese and ducks have flown, but some are still here, riding out the storm."...

Early Spring Disrupts Life on Northern Rivers

The winter-old river ice creaks and groans, shifting position. Spring has come early to the frozen upper Hudson River, and ice-out is just around the corner.

Lilliputian wildflowers will soon line the Hudson's banks. In what are known as riverside ice meadows, an ancient cycle of ice formation and melting gives rise to swamp candles, ladies'-tresses, wood lilies, and other rare, diminutive flowers.

In New York's Adirondack Mountains, ice that forms on the river in winter is pushed onto its banks in spring. There, it scours the sloping cobble shores, keeping them free of shrubs and small trees and leaving space for wildflowers to sprout in fragile, Arctic-like ice meadows.

But the future for these floral pixies, which depend on late-melting river ice, is bleak. The number of ice-covered days on northeastern rivers has declined significantly in recent winters, says hydrologist Glenn Hodgkins of the US Geological Survey (USGS) Maine Water Science Center in Augusta...

Winter Roads Need a Diet: Low Sodium

Look at any car in the northern tier of the United States in winter, and you'll see why roads need to go on a diet—a low-sodium diet.

From November through March, autos, trains, and buses in cold climes are covered in a spray of white: road salt (sodium chloride). But scientists are finding that de-icing roads during winter storms inflicts widespread damage as road salt chemicals wash downstream.

The rise of the automobile a century ago allowed people to live farther apart—and farther from where they worked—creating new issues for management of winter roads. The first major attempts at snow removal came in the early 1860s with snowplows attached to horse-drawn carts. After the great blizzard of 1888, which paralyzed the Northeast, city officials realized they had to do more than just plow streets. As roads were cleared of snow and ice, the exposed pavement retained melted snow that refroze into ice. Enter salt and sand...

Top

Full Article

Download 1.36 MB pdf

Top

Citation

Dybas, C.L. 2011. Ripple marks—The story behind the story. Oceanography 24(1):8–12, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2011.23.

Top