Featured Image Credit:Huffington Post
By: Amanda Kelley
The people of South Florida are in for a heavy dose of the “Salt Life.”
It’s getting salty in the Everglades – and not in the way that you get salty when your friends leave you out of a group chat. We mean another level of salty – like when your friends leave you out of a group chat AND they go to your favorite taco place without you after you’ve been begging to go for months…
Gif via giphy.com
Rising sea levels are causing ocean water to seep into the swampy wilderness, and it is being absorbed by the highly porous limestone bedrock beneath the mud. This wouldn’t be an issue for the pre-historic Everglades because millennia ago, fresh water would constantly flow South through rivers and flood the swamp. However, in our current age, all of that freshwater has been diverted away for agricultural irrigation and to prevent the flooding of various properties.
The Everglades is a unique and highly specialized ecosystem, so when you’ve got a change in salinity (even a minor one) impacting such a large area, you can expect some damage to the biology of the swamp. For the vegetation of this wetland, this means physically uprooting to avoid the salty invasion.
Now of course this happens over time (the grasses aren’t just getting up and walking away), but losing the connective root system means losing the structure of the swamp as the nutrient-rich mud, or peat, crumbles away without the roots to hold it in place.
It’s not just bad news for the plants either: the millions of people living in South Florida rely on the Biscayne Aquifer for 90% of their freshwater. Where is that, you ask? Directly beneath the Everglades. As the sea invades the swamp it is increasing the salt content of both the Everglades itself as well as the freshwater aquifer beneath it.
Organizations like the National Audoban Society are pushing to restore some of the natural flow of freshwater back into the Everglades in the hopes of diluting or pushing out the intrusion of salt. However, most climate change projections estimate that the Everglades will be entirely submerged if sea levels continue to rise- and that can’t be fixed by a few freshwater streams. Get your boats ready…
Photo Credit:Dr. Jack Sharet
Read more from our source: NPR