Last weekend I was thinking about which part of the park I wanted to visit when I remembered seeing a notice about a prescribed burn taking place in the Great Marsh. The initial location for the burn was about 350 acres directly to the west of Kemil road. Thinking that Kemil road might be blocked off at some point during the day I decided to head over to the Great Marsh trail which is about a mile east of there. Well… the details of these burns are dependent on weather conditions, and the burn ended up being moved to the 350ish acres between Kemil road and Broadway. Which meant that the initial ignition was about 200 feet away from the Great Marsh trail head.
With the wind blowing west to east this is the scene that greeted me when I got out of my car.Directly across the street from the parking lot the fire starters were laying down a line of fire that would slowly move to the west.As the fire took hold the smoke blowing across the road and into the Great Marsh trail got thicker, fast. For just a brief moment I though about going to a different trail. But none of the fire crew seemed to care that I was there and I decided that this was the “theme” of the day. So might as well make the most of it. It did not look like the smoke was going to get too thick…Just a few minutes on the trail and I knew this was going to be a great day to be out in the marsh. I also knew my clothes and gear were going to smell like a camp fire for about a week by the time I was done.It did not seem TOO likely that the fire would jump the road and torch my car… but what the heck, there is a train station quite close by if it came to that.After a while spent taking photos of the fire and the fire fighters in action, I turned my attention to the more usual photographic subjects along the trail. As the fire moved off to the west the air where I was would occasionally clear up.Winterberry Ivy is plentiful in this area. As a photographer my eye is more drawn to this kind of scene than the large clusters of perfectly formed berries. I like the textures in the shriveling and decaying leaves and fruit. The way that this particular leaf has curled into almost a perfect circle around the three remaining berries is what drew my attention.As always this time of year, the remaining Milkweed pods provide interesting insights. This particular one almost looks like it was intentionally cut open with a knife for the purpose of showing off the internal structure which I thought was really beautiful.My attention never left the burn going on across the road. So on the return leg of what is an out and back trail, I made a slight detour and walked along Broadway, where the initial fire line had begun. The burn crew had moved on to other parts of the burn by this time.Sometimes the wind would clear out the smoke nearby, allowing a view deeper into the burn area.The view down what was once a raised roadbed, from when the area had been drained in the expectation that people would buy lots to build homes on.After finishing the Great Marsh trail I decided to drive over to the nearby Dune Ridge trail which provides some nice elevated views into the Great Marsh where the burn was taking place. The flames mark the location of the remains of Beverly Dr., which I frequently post about.I have quite a few photos of this portion of the marsh taken from this exact spot atop the Dune Ridge. Later I will go back and find photos from different seasons before the burn to compare with this view.The wind was picking up and you could watch as the fire flared up in various spots, over and over again.
Even when you think you know what to expect before going out on a hike, you never know what you will get until you actually get there. Which is what makes this so much fun.
While admittedly a bit juvenile, Frozen Marsh Farts is actually a reasonably accurate description of the ice bubble formations shown in the image above. The formations which look like pancakes stacked atop one another are actually bubbles of methane which were encapsulated by ice as the water froze. In shallow bodies of water like a marsh, organic material from dead plants and fish form a layer of decaying organic matter on the bottom. As this organic material decays, it emits methane gas which usually simply bubbles up to the surface and is released into the atmosphere. However when the temperature suddenly drops below freezing, the water will freeze from the top down. A bubble of methane gas released from the bottom can then become trapped underneath the ice layer as the water freezes around it. If another bubble of methane is released from the same spot on the bottom of the marsh, it can rise up until it comes into contact with the bottom of the now frozen, or mostly frozen, bubble where it becomes trapped and eventually frozen in place as well. This process only happens when the rate of the freezing of the water is balanced just right against the interval between methane bubble releases which does not happen often, making this particular phenomena very uncommon in this area.
Methane is one of the gasses which can be present in flatulence, and so bubbles of methane frozen in the water made me think of… well I think you get the idea.
Although it may be difficult to tell in the photo where you see a stack of bubbles, the top of the uppermost bubble is right at the surface of the ice.I don’t know for sure, but this looks like a large bubble which ruptured at its bottom, allowing water and a bunch of smaller bubbles to form inside of it. The freezing process must have happened very quickly.This trio of stacked bubbles shows how in some cases a rising bubble presses up against the bottom of one which is freezing, forming a sort of hour glass shaped single bubble structure. In other cases the rising bubble forms completely detached from the ones above it.Looking up from the bubbles embedded in the ice. You see what looks like an ordinary late November scene out in the marsh. It would be easy to walk right on past this area and not even notice the interesting bubble formations. Training your eye to spot interesting features in the landscape takes time, but it well worth the effort.These bubbles were close enough to the boardwalk that I could get a nearly vertical perspective on them. You can see that in addition to the interesting stacked structures beneath the surface of the water, there are intricate patterns on the top of the bubbles where they reached the surface.
The next two photos are from a different part of the trail, but they nicely highlight the cool patterns of crystal formation that appear in thin sheets of ice.
