A Celebration of the World鈥檚 Barrier Islands by Orrin H. Pilkey, with original batiks by Mary Edna Fraser, Columbia University Press, $44.95/拢31, ISBN 0231119704 Reviewed by Jeff Hecht
I DISCOVERED barrier islands as a boy, when my family moved to one along the New Jersey shore. From a child鈥檚 perspective, I learned about the marshy wetlands between the island and the mainland, and the sandy beach facing the ocean. Later I visited others along the North Atlantic coast, from the hopelessly overbuilt Miami Beach and Atlantic City to the well-preserved Plum Island National Wildlife Refuge in Massachusetts.
They could hardly be more different: paved-over cities versus a long ribbon of dunes covered by beach plum shrubs between the sandy shore on the ocean side and the marsh abutting the inland lagoon. But the cities, too, sit on sand, washed up by ocean currents along shallow shorelines, with marsh and lagoon deposits built up behind them. Left to nature, these barrier islands migrate inland as sea level rises.
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Barrier islands are distributed widely but unevenly around the globe. Orrin Pilkey spent his career at Duke University in North Carolina studying them, naturally focusing on the islands lining the Atlantic coast of the US, which accounts for 23 per cent of the length of all barrier islands worldwide. Mexico is second with 10.7 per cent.
Russia, perhaps surprisingly, is third. Its 7.8 per cent of the world鈥檚 barrier islands are mostly in the Arctic and thus have a quite different dynamic to the Jersey Shore, shaped by ice and permafrost. Strong winds can push large sheets of sea ice up to 800 metres onto the island, moving as fast as a man can walk. Such ice ride-ups can flatten any houses in the way, and anyone sleeping inside may never wake.
In Iceland, ice and volcanoes combine to create different dynamics again. Some of those in Australia are what Pilkey calls 鈥渇alse鈥� barriers, formed when the sea rose to cover terrestrial dunes, not by the movement of coastal sand. Other odd barrier islands are at the mouths of the Nile and Niger rivers.
It鈥檚 a wonderful tour, richly illustrated with colour and black and white photos. Mary Edna Fraser鈥檚 silk batiks deserve special mention. They capture the sense of the islands remarkably well, giving us a keen bird鈥檚-eye view of the land. Highly recommended.