Adaptation as a Strategy

This article by Karrie Jacobs – What if New Jersey’s Meadowlands were a national park? – speaks for itself,  but I thought I might add a little context for people unfamiliar with the geography. People have heard of “the meadowlands” because of a football stadium located there but don’t necessarily understand what it is.

Most of the geography of the New York area is the result of the last ice age. The terminal moraine of the Laurentide ice runs the length of Long Island, and a fair amount of the island itself is soil scraped from further north and dumped here. Because glaciation had closed off the route of the St. Lawrence River, drainage from the west was all shunted down the Hudson River valley; because the ocean level was lower with so much water trapped as polar ice, the Hudson continued much further out towards the edge of the continental shelf. When the ice retreated, the oceans rose and drowned much of the Hudson valley, creating the present fjord-like conditions.

What is now Newark Bay and the two rivers that feed it – the Hackensack and Passaic – were tributaries of the bigger Hudson of the ice age. The higher current water levels that created New York Bay as we know it put the connection between the two systems out in the salt water of the harbor, with Newark Bay almost landlocked but connected directly to the harbor via Kill Van Kull and indirectly via Arthur Kill and Perth Amboy. Newark Bay is at current sea level, and the flood plains of the Hackensack and Passaic are barely higher. That vast wetlands/swamp is the Meadowlands. There’s a high rocky ridge to the east, occupied by the western heights of Jersey City and Hoboken, as well as Union City, West New York, and other towns; the land to the west is also higher although somewhat more gradual in its ascent.

That big wetlands area has been, for a couple of hundred years, a convenient place to put things and then forget about them, including warehouses, train yards, and abattoirs. However, even small rises in sea level will make continuation of its current uses difficult. Ms. Jacob’s article discusses an idea by the Regional Plan Association of New York to make some lemonade out of this geographic lemon.