Posted on 10/25/2002 10:27:40 AM PDT by NewHampshireDuo
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – Northern New England and New York are probably due for major storms and flooding, according to a University of Vermont study published Thursday in the journal Nature.
“I don’t think it’s cause for alarm; they don’t happen every other year,” said Paul Bierman, an adviser on the study. “But they’re out there.”
Bierman, a UVM geology professor, and the graduate students who worked with him base the findings in the article on their study of core samples that they took from the bottom of 13 ponds in Vermont and northern New York state.
They used the 2-inch wide, 25-foot-long samples to study storm patterns over the last 13,000 years. Periods of storms were indicated by layers of sand – washed into lakes and ponds by large storms – occurring in the black, sedimentary muck of silt and vegetation.
The first pond they checked was Ritterbush Pond in northern Vermont. There, “we found sandy layers clustered around 8,000 years ago, another 6,000 years ago, another around 2,500 years ago,” Bierman said. A check of another dozen ponds found that the same pattern generally prevailed.
What that tells them, said Bierman, is that New England and New York have suffered periods of intense storminess, and periods of relative calm.
“The last stormy period was 2,500 years ago or so,” he said. “We’re on our way up to another stormy period.”
But that doesn’t mean the region should brace itself for a huge storm in the next few years. In fact, nobody knows when it might happen, said Anders Noren, the lead author on the study and now a geologist working at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
“Obviously, that’s the relevant question, but we just can’t say yet,” Noren said. “Certainly you’d expect to see more of these things, but whether you’d expect to see one in your lifetime, or one in two lifetimes, or three in your lifetime, is something we still can’t say.”
Noren hopes more work – including future study on eight lakes in New Hampshire and Maine that he’s going to supervise this year – will help clear up some of those questions. The work is funded by a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation.
Meanwhile, the researchers hope what they do know can help planners nonetheless.
“It has immediate relevance to people living on a landscape affected by floods,” Noren said. “Anyone who has their house or business, or even drives along a road or bridge along one of these river floodplains, probably needs to be thinking about this kind of thing.”
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