- Hi, I'm Jessica Hester, staff writer at Atlas Obscura
and I am wearing this suit because we are trekking into
this amazing, tick-infested Sunken Forest in Fire Island
to see how this unusual ecosystem is changing.
- [Jessica] The Sunken Forest is one of only two
old growth maritime American Holly Forests in the world.
It's a gnarled, dappled patch of woods on the long
skinny barrier island just 60 miles
from New York City.
The forest is incredible and it's disappearing.
But not for the reasons you might think.
- If you pick up the sassafras leaves and you crush it up
like this and smell it, it smells like Fruit Loops.
- It really does.
(both laughing)
- This is Jordan Raphael, the Park Biologist.
He's worked with the National Park Service
at Fire Island for around 15 years and probably
knows the Sunken Forest better than anyone.
We met up at his office across the bay,
packed up historic maps and old photos and headed off.
But the island is only accessible by boat.
- I like absolutely everything about this boat.
When I fantasized about being a park ranger as a kid,
this is like exactly the kind of thing
that I dreamed that they would do.
Is be able to zip around in cool boats.
It's a little big.
(walkie talkie buzzing)
- [Jessica] On the ride over, Jordan explained
that the Sunken Forest isn't literally sunken,
though it kind of looks that way.
The trees-American Holly, sassafras, black gum, Shadblow-
grow behind two rows of sand dunes cradled
between the ocean and the bay.
Looking out from the elevated boardwalk,
it's easy to see how the forest got it's name.
The dunes almost completely obscure
the view of the forest from the ocean.
The canopies are pruned by salt air blowing in
from the Atlantic so the leaves don't peak out
above the sand.
And following the path deeper into the forest,
you really do feel like you're sinking and secluded.
- [Jordan] Dispatch sea shore four one zero,
arrived at Sailor's Haven.
- [Jessica] Before we wandered into the woods,
we stopped at the visitor center so Jordan could
show me archival photos
of what the forest looked like decades ago.
They were handed down by Hank Art,
an Environmental Scientist who studied the forest
beginning in the '60s.
By using the pictures as comparison tools,
Jordan estimates that about 40%
of the Sunken Forest has already disappeared
over the last few decades.
- We'll go in, we can pull some of these pictures
out to see what it looked like then,
and what it looks like now.
My boss that started here in the mid '90s,
said when you stood here
you couldn't hardly even see the water.
- [Jessica] Wow - [Jordan] And that was
- [Jordan] In the mid '90s.
- [Jessica] Because there were so many trees?
- [Jordan] Because there were so many trees here.
This is another area where the boardwalk had to be
re-diverted because of erosion here,
so this used to be a look out.
- [Jessica] Erosion worsened by docks and marinas
has really reshaped the edges of the forest.
Jordan pointed out its old silhouette
on an aerial image that the Army Corps of Engineers
took back in the '30s.
As the forest boundaries are washed away,
the land is pinched.
It keeps getting narrower and narrower.
Climate change is a main culprit too,
but in some surprising ways.
When you think of rising water, maybe you picture waves
drowning a shore line, but in the Sunken Forest,
sea level rise is doing something else.
Oh wow there's so much water down there.
- Yeah, so you can see that when we are talking
about the water table impacting the trees,
it's really close to the surface.
- Yeah.
- These have always been here but,
they don't quite drain like they used too.
We'll have water that will be standing here
after a rain for quite some time,
and even when it doesn't rain, there will be
standing water in here and that's from the water table,
again just getting pushed up.
- [Jessica] Sea water isn't breaching the dunes
and sloshing into the woods.
Instead, as the land erodes,
the whole water table is rising.
There have always been slow draining patches in the woods,
but now there's a lot of standing fresh water
in places where there wasn't before.
And those swampy pools are causing the trees
around them to rot and die.
- [Jordan] So a lot of these ticks carry different pathogens
that could make you sick, one being Lyme disease.
So we don't want any of our staff and especially you,
getting Lyme disease.
- [Jessica] Shrinking land and rising water
are big problems for the forest,
but there's another menace that's also causing
a lot of trouble.
To get a closer look, we had to venture
off the boardwalk.
The threat is eating the forest to death,
and it's pretty cute.
It's the deer. Fire Island is full of them,
and unfortunately for the Sunken Forest,
they've got an appetite for American Holly.
Some parts of the forest have been fenced off
so deer can't get to them.
It's easy to compare those areas to the rest
of the woods where there's an obvious graze line.
It's at the deer's mouth level, and below it
the animals have picked almost everything clean.
- This is a good example of new growth
of a Holly that a deer has not been able to get to.
So it does have a natural defense once it's able
to get established because it's Holly
and it's got all these thorns.
- [Jessica] Mmhm.
- But when it pops out new growth, again,
it's impacted by anything that's in the browse line.
The deer will nip it off right away.
- So is that why these lower branches are empty?
- Yep, you can see, see all the browsing here?
Look at all that browsing.
See each part is nipped off,
there's some new growth here that hasn't been eaten yet.
But pretty much all of it, boom boom boom boom anything.
- [Jessica] The deer eat the soft new leaves,
which means that young plants get gobbled up,
and there's not much fresh growth in the forest.
Plants are being nibbled faster than there are
new ones to take their place.
In the areas where the deer are banished, though,
the forest is thicker.
It's lush, it's green, it's full of new growth.
The forest won't be around forever.
Jordan says it's hard to say how long it has;
maybe 25 years, maybe 50, maybe 100, maybe more.
Though the island is taking some steps to curb
the deer population, they haven't found a way
to shore up the bay against erosion,
or to stop the water table from rising.
It's just a matter of time.
Climate change will drive people from their homes,
reshape cities, and cause blooms of disease.
Many of those impacts will be huge
and massively visible.
But the Sunken Forest is a reminder that
some destruction will be subtle.
Chipping away at beautiful, unsung places,
before many people even know
that they're there to begin with.
Today, you can't see the forest from the beach.
Eventually, no matter where you stand,
there won't be much forest left to see at all.
(wind roaring)
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