RED FLAG

Cape Cod Climate Research Station Abandoned Because It’s About to Fall Into the Sea

The station has been diligently reporting on the changing climate for the past 51 years, but the advancing seas have made it too dangerous to use.

A research station that’s been diligently reporting on the changing climate for the past 51 years has been abandoned because it faced an imminent threat of being swallowed up by the advancing seas. According to The Guardian, the final researchers left the National Weather Service outpost in Chatham—on the southeastern tip of Cape Cod—at the end of March, and a demolition crew is set to destroy the site. Andy Nash, head meteorologist at the NWS office in Boston, said: “We felt we had maybe another 10 years but then we started losing a foot of a bluff a week and realized we didn’t have years, we had just a few months. We were a couple of storms from a very big problem.” Andrew Ashton from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, based on Cape Cod, said what’s happened at the station is a precursor of “what we’ll see along the whole coast... We are unprepared for how much worse things will be with climate change.”