I’ve often wondered what it was like when glaciers carved out Maine’s coast and mountains.
Did big tendrils of ice slowly creep down from the Arctic and cut through the local bedrock, like a knife through warm butter? Or was it the retreat of the ice sheets, as the planet warmed back up, that molded the landscape into its peaks, ridges, valleys, and offshore islands?
This has been on my mind partly because I just celebrated my 40th birthday by hiking Katahdin, a 4,000-foot mass of granite that forces you to consider its origins as you claw and sweat your way up it.
More bleakly, as we heat up the planet, we’re now seeing some of the glaciers that survived the last ice age disappear, bringing disasters like the floods that just killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal.
So I eagerly read a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Maine Coast, in which UMaine geology experts Joseph and Alice Kelley recap more than 500 million years of the region’s tectonic, glacial, marine, and human history (full review on page 21).
The glaciers, it turns out, did not fully shape what’s now Maine—the movement of the earth’s crust and volcanic activity played big, earlier roles—but they did a lot.
They formed as the planet started to cool down 65 million years ago, due to several things, including the rise of the Himalayan Mountains, the migration of Antarctica to the South Pole, and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, all of which helped change the flow of air and water over the planet. Changes in Earth’s orbit also played a role, limiting how much sunlight reached the planet.
In what’s now Maine, falling snow packed into ice sheets more than a mile thick that acted like gravity-fed conveyor belts, depressing the earth, scouring away looser rock and debris, and depositing it far away.
The glaciers eventually melted as the planet warmed back up, and the Kelleys devote the last part of their book to people, starting with the Wabanaki who arrived soon after this thaw started, followed much later by the Europeans.
I was struck by the theories those later settlers brought with them, like the 19th century scientific view that boulders strewn across New England fields were delivered not by glaciers, but by the global flood Noah survived on his ark.
Perhaps it wasn’t such a crazy notion that a flood had once consumed the planet. Some 15,000 years earlier, the Atlantic Ocean had swept miles inland towards the Katahdin region, as the glaciers first melted and inundated the land before, freed of their weight, it could rebound to its present heights.
And by that time the sea was again encroaching, as the Industrial Revolution was starting to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses and begin a new phase of planetary warming.
As the Kelleys note, this slow-motion, manmade deluge is now the biggest issue facing the coast. The challenge is even greater because some communities have come to depend on counterproductive infrastructure like seawalls and jetties to protect themselves from the ocean.
“All coastal environments and their inhabitants must accommodate this recent rate of sea-level rise or be drowned,” they write, in a message that echoes through the book.
Maybe it’s natural that I’m now looking back on all this. Lots of aging men get into history. There was that meme a few years ago about the male obsession with the Roman empire.
While I’m not there yet, I did make a point of taking in some Greek mythology this summer, watching from a reclining movie theater seat as Odysseus took on gods, witches, warriors, and monsters.
It made me wonder what myths will be told about us, millennia from now. Did we sail closer to the six-headed beast that ate a few members of our crew? Or did a whirlpool sink our whole ship?
Charles Eichacker is the editor of The Working Waterfront and Island Journal. He may be contacted at ceichacker@islandinstitute.org.
