Fox Island In Chesapeake Bay Winking Out; 30+ Acre Remnant Now Only A Few Inches Above The Sea
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Hundreds of years ago, Fox Island probably wasn’t so isolated, as part of a peninsula stretching from around Crisfield toward the mouth of the bay. Now, the only other remnants are a clump of islands known as Clump Island to the north, and to the south Watts Island, known for being a hiding spot for pirates. In 1929, someone saw fit to build a hunting lodge there, and 50 years after that, the bay foundation bought it. What happened in the decades that followed, many visitors describe with the same word: magic.
From March through October, Varnon, Laird and many staff members before them brought groups as young as fifth graders and as old as college students. The lodge sleeps about 20, including their teachers. No two trips were the same. Depending on what students were learning in their environmental science classes or after-school clubs, foundation staff would take them to test water quality or check on patches of underwater grasses. They might visit Smith Island and meet the famous cake baker, Mary Ada Marshall, or go to Tangier Island to meet Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge. It just depended on what students were learning about, or what the winds and the waves might allow.
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The future could be short for Fox Island, which now totals less than three dozen acres, much of it only inches above sea level. Islands like it have been losing ground to what is known as subsidence, the sinking of the land, at a rate of about 1 millimeter a year, said Donald Boesch, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Sea level has been rising at close to 2 millimeters a year. The result has been about a foot of sea level rise in the Chesapeake since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s expected to rise perhaps twice as fast, or faster, over this century, he said.
“What took a few hundred years in the past is now going to be played out in less than 100 years,” Boesch said. While it came as no surprise that trips to Fox Island would one day end, the changes have, at times, still been alarming to see for those who have been visiting the lodge the longest. Tom Horton, a former Baltimore Sun environmental writer who worked as an educator for the bay foundation in the 1980s and 1990s, recalled seeing underwater land where he once pitched a tent.
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https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/environment/bs-md-fox-island-20191101-ch3lyq6bwbhp3djo3etl5acmhq-story.html