Feb 1, 2005 11:12 am US/Eastern
New England Hurricane History: Digging Up Our Past
Jeff Donnelly, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Cape Cod, MA
For thousands of years, hurricanes have battered our coast, but historical records of these storms only go back to the 17th Century when European settlers first arrived on our shores. To investigate our distant past, geologists turn back the pages of time by studying the ground below. Over the last several years, I have been extracting sediment cores from marshy areas behind barrier beaches on Cape Cod. Like rings on a tree, these long cylinders of mud tell a stormy tale of past hurricanes dating back over 1000 years!
When a hurricane hits southern New England, the rising waters (storm surge) and wave action along our coast sweep tons of sand into muddy back barrier marshes. The stronger the hurricane, the thicker the layer of sand swept inland. These sandy layers are then preserved in organic sediments that stack up over the years, leaving a record behind that reads like a history book.
By using aluminum tubes vibrated down into the ground, I have collected over 100 cores from a variety of sites on Cape Cod. Based on my analysis of the deposits, 10 major (Category 3 or stronger) hurricanes have hit New England over the last 1000 years. This translates to a frequency of one major hurricane each century. These results offer the public and the insurance industry a long-term perspective on the risk hurricanes pose to our region and foreshadow the future—we are due. New England Hurricane History: Digging Up Our Past This sediment core begins with a narrow stripe of sand from Hurricane Carol in 1954. The wide band that follows is from the Hurricane of 1938. Next, a hurricane from 1869, another dating back to 1815 and a major strike in 1635, documented by the Pilgrims and Puritans, only five years after the original settlement of Boston.
Jeff Donnelly is a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He is currently extracting sediment cores in the tropics to piece together a record of Atlantic hurricanes dating back several thousand years.
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