The Rutgers University Marine Field Station (RUMFS) is a research hub dedicated to coastal research, climate change, and oceanography based in Tuckerton. And one day it will be flooded by sea level rise.
The New Jersey coastline is experiencing sea level rise at some of the highest rates on the planet. Due to global warming, glaciers are melting and creating higher water levels. The land along the New Jersey coastline is also sinking, called subsidence.
“So at the same time the water’s rising, we’re sinking,” said Marine scientist Lisa Auermuller, the executive director of the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, who also works in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. “So relatively, it seems we’re even rising at a faster rate because our baseline is actually where the land is, is actually going down.”
All of this impacts the research station, which sits beside the Little Egg Inlet by the Mullica River-Great Bay estuary.
The station is a working lab with ongoing graduate and postdoctoral-level research occurring year-round, led by marine scientists from Rutgers University. A portion of this research involves teams of researchers and Rutgers students collecting fish and crab larvae that they identify and track, as well as documenting sea level rise.
During extremely high tides, scientists have to drive a flooded roadway to get to the station, and water comes in under the facility.
“The relative sea level rises even faster here,” said Thomas “Motz” Grothues, a scientist at Rutgers and the director of RUMFS. “It’s very noticeable.”
The base, built in 1972, will one day be completely flooded by the rising tides. The team has decided that instead of fighting back against this inevitability, they are going to let it happen and study it while it happens to shed light on this global phenomenon. This also involves dismantling the station to avoid polluting the marsh with wreckage.
This was showcased in the short documentary “The Retreat,” produced and directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Thomas F. Lennon, who is also the director of the Documentary Film Lab at Rutgers Filmmaking Center at Mason Gross School of the Arts. The film began production in 2021, making frequent visits and interviewing members of the team and showcasing the real-time impact of coastal erosion.
“We are really on the front end of seeing the impacts of what that increased water level means,” said Auermuller.
