Strangely, lagoons move. Today’s surfers walk across the relics of yesterday’s drowned lakes. Barrier beaches migrated landward, emerging from the ocean just as “marine transgressions” (that’s advancing oceans, not the naughtiness of waves) slowed. Shaped in stable times, coastal lakes still don’t hang around for long. This shouldn’t surprise me – I know that, despite appearances, beaches are really rivers of sand.
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If the tides were higher, if the rivers was faster or siltier, if Australia wasn’t so seismically serene, the lagoons would fill up and dry out or be washed away, and the cormorants would have to hunt elsewhere. In fact, for all our dredging and draining, it’s happening right now. Like life itself, coastal lagoons are a transitory phenomenon, a passing pleasure.
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And then there’s the gyttja, something so very special it’s found nowhere else in Australia, and helps qualify Myall Lakes as a unique protected wetland. What is it? Well, rotting pondweed. No, I’m underselling it: it’s up to 70cm of “a highly mobile and organic mud that has a gelatinous appearance”, a “flocculent green–brown material” (Drew et al 2008), “an uncompacted, anoxic and sulphurous ‘ooze'” made from “the decomposition of charophytes, macrophytes, cyanobacteria and algae”. Strangely, not so much about the ooze in the National Parks brochures. But it’s an ooze that’s been there for, perhaps, a thousand years.
8 thoughts on “Midwinter lagoon”
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Stunning images! Much of this was new information to me. Thank you for a well researched, thoughtful and beautifully illustrated post. I will be looking at lagoons differently now!
Thanks Jane! Trying to strike a balance between too much info and oversimplifying the picture was a bit of a challenge with this one. It feels different being in a landscape when you can look right into it, if you know what I mean – knowing the names of the plants and animals, and what the botany tells you about the geology, and why there are so much fish, or what the birds are doing…. Suddenly everything becomes much more meaningful. Thanks so much for tweeting about my posts – I’ve had some people come to visit my site thanks to your help! I am still coming to terms with Twitter – the logic of it is so different from other forms of social media. So thanks for helping me on my way. I found your most recent post very powerful too – you take your readers into what must be a raw part of your past in a very moving way. Thanks again for reading.
No need to thank me as I’ve gained a great deal of pleasure from your blog and you’ve been very supportive of mine too. 🙂