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89 11 The Core Locker Netarts Bay, Oregon, 1986 Use what sense you have, observe well, go ahead and guess your very best as to what to do. Science is not going to help you much or prove you wrong until you are very old indeed. —Frederick Storrs Baker Mark Darienzo was looking for a quick and easy master’s degree: it was about that simple. All he wanted was to teach geology at a community college. He had a vision: himself in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, in a cluttered office in an old brick building—or on a modern college’s concrete campus, it really didn’t matter—in some out-of-the-way place. A small department, focused on teaching, no pressure to publish. He had actually met a guy like that once, back when he was in the Navy and was taking a field geology course at Bowdoin College in Maine. The professor was the school’s only geologist, a one-man department. He even wore the tweed jacket. Was that so much to want? Which is the short version of how Darienzo, at age thirty-five, found himself squatting among the trampled skunk cabbages and spiky juncus in the salt marsh at the southern end of Netarts Bay on the northern Oregon coast, pounding on a meter-long piece of black ABS pipe and plunging it into the muck. It was a fine day in early spring. The narrow, five-mile-long sand spit defining the bay’s seaward side was densely forested, blocking the wind and more or less blocking sounds from the state park campground a quarter mile away. Now and then a car would pass on two-lane Whiskey Creek Road along the inland edge of the bay. Gulls mewed overhead. A raven croaked hollowly from its perch in a tall spruce, then relocated in an ebony flurry to a new perch, and croaked again. Darienzo had done marsh coring before, back east. Just once, actually— part of a project for a tidal marsh class at the University of Delaware. Granted, that was a few years ago. After college, after the Navy and a series 90 The Next Tsunami of jobs in New Mexico and Oregon, Darienzo had enrolled the year before in an interdisciplinary master’s program at the University of Oregon in Eugene, one that, if he played his cards right, would land him that teaching job in a year or two. His program required him to do some kind of project or thesis, and he’d thought back to that marsh coring in Delaware. What if he did the same thing in Oregon, coring in the salt marsh here? It would tie together the fields he’d chosen for his interdisciplinary degree—geology, physical geography, and oceanography. He would learn field techniques to share with his future students. And it wouldn’t cost him much, just a few bucks for some plastic pipe and a roll of Saran Wrap. It would be interesting to compare cores pulled here, on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in Oregon, with what comes up in cores pulled from marshes on the Atlantic coast, though he didn’t expect much difference. Continuous peat cores, that’s what they were called: tall columns of mucky peat about as deep as you could core. Age-date the layers with radiocarbon dating—old, older, oldest, the deeper you got—and you had the story: a marsh inundated by rising seas, the mean sea level rising slowly and steadily since the end of the last ice age, thousands of years ago. As the sea rose, mud would settle on top of the drowned peat, and new peat would begin growing on top of the old, as vegetation reestablished itself at the edge of the marsh. Continuously. Sand Lake, a shallow bay ringed with marsh on the central coast, seemed like a good spot for such coring. And his advisor had agreed, requesting only that he first do some coring in Netarts Bay, the next bay north. No problem: plenty of marsh at Netarts Bay to core, and only one landowner—the state park—to ask for permission. Simple. But none of the core samples he had pulled so far from the marsh at the edge of Netarts Bay looked anything like he expected, not one. There were layers of peat in there, definitely, but most of what he was pulling up wasn’t plant material...

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