It’s not an uncommon sight along the Mid-Atlantic coast, forest meeting marsh; it’s the very nature of brackish environments, the give-and-take of fresh and saltwater ecosystems. Yet rising tides and sea level are methodically, but inexorably, unending the natural balance here. Forests are dying off as saltwater intrudes on freshwater systems, and in the same stroke, sea level rise is displacing sediments to unbury trees up to a thousand years old. Scientists are calling these scenes “ghost forests.”

The trail of ghost forests in New Jersey might be the most stark, but the state is one of many affected along the East Coast. Research by Dr. Matthew Kirwan at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science suggests that 100,000 acres of coastal forest around the Chesapeake Bay have died off from rising seas since the 1850’s. “You see these dying forests up and down the Atlantic coast,” Kirwan says. “They’re basically in every low lying estuary in the Mid-Atlantic seaboard of the United States.”