Rising Sea Levels Will Isolate People Long Before They’re Underwater – Hakai Magazine

Sea fog envelopes a rocky segment of coastline at low tide near Fundy National Park in Alma, New Brunswick (by Eric Van Lochem, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia).

Time and tide wait for no man. Neither does sea level rise. The Chignecto Isthmus—the low marshy strip connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia—may be one of the most vulnerable places in Canada to sea level rise. At just 21 kilometers wide, the interprovincial land bridge is battered on its southwestern flank by the famously extreme tides in the Bay of Fundy. Protected by a network of earthen dikes first constructed in the 1600s, “the tops of the dikes are only a little higher than the spring high tides,” says Jeff Ollerhead, a coastal geomorphologist…“If we have a big storm,” he says, “water will go over the dikes.”