Florida Keys ill-prepared for rising sea

From an article by Cammy Clark in The Miami Herald:

BIG PINE KEY -- Treasure salvors searching for an 18th-century wreck in the Florida Straits a few years ago made a fascinating but little noticed discovery.

Not buried treasure. Buried land.

Some 35 miles west of Key West, in 45 feet of water under a five-foot layer of dense mud lay an 8,500-year-old shoreline not unlike today's coast of the Florida Keys. There were well-preserved mangroves, pine cones and pine tree pieces, some amazingly still fragrant when brought to the surface.

'Looking at it, I was thinking: `Wow, this could be the shoreline of Big Pine Key,' '' said Corey Malcom, director of archaeology for the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society.

The prehistoric past paints a sobering picture of what many experts see as an all-too-near future for the string of low-lying islands that make up the Florida Keys.

''South Florida is on the front line against sea-level rise in the United States, and the Florida Keys are ground zero,'' said Evan Flugman, who co-authored a Florida International University report on the importance of Monroe County tackling the issue now.

By 2100, under the best-case predictions of a seven-inch sea-level rise by an international climate panel, the Keys would lose about 59,000 acres of real estate worth $11 billion, according to the nonprofit Nature Conservancy.

Under the panel's worst-case projection of ocean waters rising 23.2 inches, about 75 percent of the Keys 154,000 acres and nearly 50 percent of its $43 billion property value could become submerged. Consequences also include the loss of habitat for many endangered plants and species, including Key deer.