http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060722/NEWS/607220449
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 07/22/06
STAFF REPORT
When it hit Long Beach Island, the hurricane of Sept. 3, 1821, leveled ancient Atlantic white cedar trees and filled the island's freshwater lakes with sand.
More than 130 years later, workers who built the Garden State Parkway on the mainland in the 1950s found other massive trees buried in mainland bogs, where they too had been blown down by the storm's wide-ranging winds.
Earlier generations of woodsmen pried up giant cedar trunks, preserved in the deep muck of Pine Barrens swamps, to make wooden shingles. Called "mined" cedar, it was likely an artifact of even earlier hurricanes. Scientists have found other buried testaments to fierce weather, perhaps even worse than 1821.
Boring into the silt and sands at Whale Beach in Cape May County and Brigantine in Atlantic County, Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and other scientists found layered traces of sand formations, called overwash fans, caused by storm waves rolling across the barrier islands. The layers of beach sand were unmistakable, stacked between layers of salt marsh muds like frosting in a chocolate torte.
A hurricane on Aug. 19, 1788, tracked north along the coast, probably close to the 1821 track, the Donnelly team wrote in a paper published in 2004 by the journal Coastal Geology. Even less is known about the 1788 storm, but the scientists found some accounts that estimated the storm's high tide at nearly 10 feet above sea level, about the same as the 1821 hurricane.
Deeper sediments at Brigantine hinted at even more powerful storms that happened before European settlement. Using radioactive carbon-14 isotopes for dating, Donnelly and his group found a heavy layer of beach sand deposited by an intense storm that happened between 1278 and 1438, and another from the 6th or 7th century.
What's most impressive is how all those overwash deposits were carried much farther over the islands than sands from 20th-century storms, Donnelly and his co-authors noted. Back then, when sea level was lower, the beach was hundreds of feet farther east.
Kirk Moore
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 07/22/06
STAFF REPORT
When it hit Long Beach Island, the hurricane of Sept. 3, 1821, leveled ancient Atlantic white cedar trees and filled the island's freshwater lakes with sand.
More than 130 years later, workers who built the Garden State Parkway on the mainland in the 1950s found other massive trees buried in mainland bogs, where they too had been blown down by the storm's wide-ranging winds.
Earlier generations of woodsmen pried up giant cedar trunks, preserved in the deep muck of Pine Barrens swamps, to make wooden shingles. Called "mined" cedar, it was likely an artifact of even earlier hurricanes. Scientists have found other buried testaments to fierce weather, perhaps even worse than 1821.
Boring into the silt and sands at Whale Beach in Cape May County and Brigantine in Atlantic County, Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and other scientists found layered traces of sand formations, called overwash fans, caused by storm waves rolling across the barrier islands. The layers of beach sand were unmistakable, stacked between layers of salt marsh muds like frosting in a chocolate torte.
A hurricane on Aug. 19, 1788, tracked north along the coast, probably close to the 1821 track, the Donnelly team wrote in a paper published in 2004 by the journal Coastal Geology. Even less is known about the 1788 storm, but the scientists found some accounts that estimated the storm's high tide at nearly 10 feet above sea level, about the same as the 1821 hurricane.
Deeper sediments at Brigantine hinted at even more powerful storms that happened before European settlement. Using radioactive carbon-14 isotopes for dating, Donnelly and his group found a heavy layer of beach sand deposited by an intense storm that happened between 1278 and 1438, and another from the 6th or 7th century.
What's most impressive is how all those overwash deposits were carried much farther over the islands than sands from 20th-century storms, Donnelly and his co-authors noted. Back then, when sea level was lower, the beach was hundreds of feet farther east.
Kirk Moore
