Gold Hill Daily News

Encroachment of the Sea.

It is well known to geologists that the sea has been gradually encroaching upon several portions of the American coast; but its advance has been most noted on certain parts of New Jersey. A correspondent of the New York Evening Post, writing from Cape May, gives some interesting information upon the subject. He says:

On the west side of Cape May, at a point where the shore is most boldly outlined, the solid gravel bank, from 12 to 15 feet high, wears away about one foot a year; the foundations of the houses built at the first settlement, as early as 1693, wore long since undermined, and the waters of the bay now cover the place where they once stood. At this cape, the most southerly point of the New Jersey coast, the encroachment of the tides is equally rapid, a full mile having been washed away since the Revolution. During that period, according to the report of the State Geological Survey, a militia artillery company had its practicing ground here. Their gun was placed near a house which stood just aside of the present shore line and their target was set up three-quarters a mile east. This last point was at the outer edge of the cultivated ground, between which and the water's edge there are sand hills or beaches a quarter of a mile in extent. The whole of this is now gone; and one of the hotels has twice been moved inland, on account of the constant advance of the tide.

Old observers upon the Atlantic and Bay shores all agree as to the gradual advance of the ocean upon the uplands. Narrow fringes of wood which the salt water, and numerous islands—spaces of land found surrounded by salt marsh—which, within the memory of men now living, have been cultivated, and others which were in woods, have been entirely lost in the advancing marsh, and their location is only to be known by the shallowness of the mud which covers them. In all the salt marshes on this shore, stumps of trees, of the common species of the country, are found with the roots still fast in the solid ground at the bottom of the marsh, and this at depths far below low water mark.

Similar submerged forests, it may be incidentally remarked, are observed on the Massachusetts and other coasts.

The period during which this subsidence has been in progress cannot be estimated with any degree of accuracy. From the best evidence that can be gathered, it would seem to be certain that two feet in a hundred years is not above the rate at which the shore is now sinking. These changes on the New Jersey coast do not appear to be confined to the more southern shore. The same thing has been observed in the salt marshes on the Raritan, and at the mouths of the Hackensack and Passaic rivers.

Mr. Lyell, in his work on the Principles of Geology, says: "Recent observations have disclosed to us the wonderful fact, that not only the west coast of South America, but also other large areas, as Scandinavia and certain archipelagoes in the Pacific, are slowly and insensibly rising; while other regions, such as Greenland, and parts of the Pacific and Indian oceans, in which atolls or circular coral islands, abound, are as gradually sinking." Professor Hitchcock, in his report on the Geology of Massachusetts, mentions the same phenomena exhibited there. Mr. Lyell, in his First Visit to America, speaking of the coast of Georgia, says:

"I even suspect that this coast is now sinking down at a slow and insensible rate, for the sea is encroaching and gaining at many points on the fresh water marshes." Bartram, the botanist, writing in 1792, testified that along the coasts of Carolina, Georgia and Florida, the tides encroach upon the marshes which were once high land covered with forests.