 I'm Leslie McVane, welcome to CTN member highlight. Today we're on Fowler Beach on Long Island, Maine with Oceanside Conservation Trust for their 34th annual meeting here on a beach that used to be in my family, and so it means a lot to me to be here. Folks, thanks for inviting me back. As a geographer and as an Englishman, I don't always get a second invitation, so I really appreciate the fact that you've decided to let me come back again. For those of you who were here last time, it's a real pleasure to be able to talk to a group like this. Always interested in the work that organizations, nonprofit organizations like this do, trying to preserve the landscape that I take such pleasure and such profit from. Make an honest living and raise money by studying and teaching people about this kind of environment. So I'm used to working in a lecture theater with PowerPoints, and since I don't have any of those electronics, what I did was make up a sort of paper version of a resource that I thought might be interesting and useful for you guys to look at. There are 30 of these and I counted noses. You may have to share a couple of them, but you're welcome to keep them when we're done here. I'm keeping one up front here so I'll actually remind myself what I'm talking about as I go. As Tom pointed out, I'm not a native of this country. I do talk a bit funny, and for those of you who are not familiar with the British accent, don't hesitate to wave some body parts around if you can't follow what I'm saying or if I use strange words like aluminium and vitamin and so forth. Actually, aluminium and vitamin doesn't make a major part of what we're going to talk about today. All right, so I'm going to talk for, I don't know, 35 or 40 minutes. I'm a professor, so I can talk for hours, but there are other professors in the audience and my old friend Tom, and so they'll shut me up if I go on too long. I like a bit of informality, so if you've got a question, just speak up and I'll do my best to answer it. Okay, so first of all, what does a geographer do? Geography isn't a big discipline in this part of the world. Most of the Ivy League universities got rid of their geographers about 100 years ago. I think Dartmouth is the only college that still has a geography program, so we're something of a rarity. And geographers, British geographers, are kind of like the Korean greengrocers of academia. You know, there's a lot of us and we came over, you know, when somebody changed the visa regulations a bit and we're really keen on doing what we do and we care to think we do it quite well. So there's a lot of British geographers kicking around in the States and we work cheap as well. So I may not be the only one you'll encounter. All right, so what I'm gonna do is walk you through my version of the geography of Casco Bay up at the top. There's a little asterisk right around the top of the quaternary in the Holocene and that's where the last bit of main geology happened. Okay, so you can make any, you can insert your own main hilarious joke about the fact that all the rocks here are really old except for a few very recent arrivals. I'll let you figure that out for yourself. Okay, so that's the geological history of the region and then down at the bottom of section A, there's a geo-referenced map from 1776, the year of the American Revolution and that map is in the OSHA map library at the University of Southern Maine and one of my students, Rosemary Mosier, took that map and superimposed it on the current aerial image of Portland and geo-referenced it so it fits and what you can see on that map is how much the city of Portland has changed since 1776. You can see where the old map of the city lives and you can see where the made ground, the added landscape of the city of Portland is and on top of that I've included the flood prediction maps and we'll talk about those a little bit as we get to the end of our discussion. So what we're gonna do for a moment is quickly reprise the long geological history of Maine. One of the awesome things about studying geography in Maine is that a merciful creator or perhaps evolution equipped nearly every single human being on the face of the planet, nearly all of them with a map of Maine that they carry everywhere with them, okay? So if you look at the back of your left hand, that's a nice little map of Maine and the knuckle right there is Mount Katahdin. Up at the top is Fort Kent and if you run your finger through the bandsaw it's an even better map, okay? Just take that little tip of that middle finger off but there's the map of Maine and the coast runs from the wrist bone up to the base of your thumb. Callus is up here, okay? So there's the coast of Maine. All right, so if you flip your map over what you can see on the geology map of Maine is a whole set of colors, diagonal stripes. And each one of those diagonal stripes represents a different rock unit, a different type of rock. And you can see underneath that some clever soul has put the lidar image which is the three-dimensional image of the state of Maine. Okay, so does anybody see a pattern? Geographers love patterns in space. Anybody see a pattern to either the lumps on the ground or the stripes in the rock? Nothing to do with the ice, nothing to do with the ice. Pardon me? No, the big pattern is everything goes from the bottom left hand corner to the top right hand corner. It all runs, I may have missed the answer. There's a lot of wind, a lot of stuff going on here. But yeah, everything goes from the southwest to the northeast and what we're looking at there is the evidence of continental collision. Iapetus, the proto-Atlantic, closing, smashing in to North America. And then during the Carboniferous and into the Devonian Carboniferous, tearing away again, rotationally separating out. And the rocks of Casco Bay, you pass this first one around. This is a nice little piece of schist or a rock with some schistosity. Oh, I love saying that, schistosity to it. And you can see it's got this sort of flaky, layering layer cake structure. And that tells the story of the continental collision and then right through the middle of it is a line of quartz, which tells the story of the separation as the rocks tore apart again. So I'll send that one round. And if you stroll around the beaches here, you can see that layered rock all around. And if you step back from Casco Bay a little bit and you look along the islands, or even just think about the island names, Clabbert Island, Whale Boat Island. Are there any other islands that suggest something? Long Island. Okay, all of these islands are long and skinny because they reflect the structure, first of all, of that process of collision and then secondly, of that process of separation. We're just dating in around 200 million? Yep, and then the separation is about 65 million. So big chunks of time here. And the process of separation has been one that has been studied by three scholars. And I've had the privilege to work with all three of them. Mark Swanson, the structural geologist down here in Maine, University of Southern Maine, who deals with the southern end of the Norambega Fault. Dyke Euston at Bates, who deals with the central section of the Norambega Fault. And my colleague, Chun Zeng Wang, up at the University of Maine Preskyle, who deals with the northern section of the Norambega Fault. And the Norambega Fault shows up in the middle map, slightly smaller with reds and greens there. Those black lines are the fault lines which tell the story of the process of separation. And tearing the continent apart was a process of incredible violence, amazing amounts of Newtonian force involved there. So much so that my colleague's instructional geology tell me that the laws of physics, as we understand them, didn't really work in the same way at 35 kilometers down into the Earth's crust as semi-plastic materials were compressed and torn apart. My colleague, Mark Swanson, was very excited that he had invented a new word to describe the plastic deformation of rocks, the shearing of rock materials and sometimes the plastic deformation and smearing, which he described as smearing. And then we had a guy from New York City who was very fond of bagels who came and said, no, you didn't invent that word. You get cream cheese. You get a smear and so Mark was very sad until we gave him a bagel. And then he realized that you could make the cream cheese do the same thing if you pushed it just right. So that's geologists for you. Okay, so the reason that this is significant is because it forms the overall structure of all of the islands in Casco Bay and even further up the coast in some cases, it defines the structure of the hills that run throughout Maine. The reason that all of our routeways tend to run from the Southwest to the Northeast is because it's cheaper and easier to travel along the sides of the hills rather than go over top of them. It's a reason we don't have an East West highway, just too darn expensive to build over all those hills. So that structure is significant because it defines the shape of the landscape and it also defines the shape of the pythymetry giving Casco Bay a multitude of ledges, small deep places, little pockets in the ocean floor which give us this diverse ecology which has provided the incredibly or parts of the incredibly rich ecosystem that we have historically enjoyed around here. Okay, so that's the geology and because of all those necks and islands, we are blessed with the great Maine adage about navigation which some of you may have encountered, you can't get there from here. You have to go up the necks, you can't go between the necks, you can't get there from here. Okay, so that's the big historical picture. The framework, the armature of the landscape is built on that 250, 220, 65 million year old geological history. Now what we're gonna do is move on to section B. And in section B, I had a bit of spare time on my hands. So I tinkered around a little bit with the curve which is down the main quaternary relative sea level. This is a sea level curve that has been produced by my friend and colleague Joe Kelly up at the Climate Change Institute at UMaine R&O and his co-worker, Dan Belknap. They've been working on this curve for about 25 years now and it tells the story, not of the big curly bracket part of Maine's history on my stratigraphic column, but of the little asterisk part of Maine's geological history. Instead of hundreds of millions of years, the next major episode that happens in Maine's geological history happens within the last quarter of a million years or so. That's in the Holocene, as it's sometimes called, the period of time from the end of the last ice age forward and then the period that immediately precedes that, which is the ice age itself. So let's look at our general reference map of Maine. We've got two sets of features going on here. All of the structural geology features line up from knuckle to thumb like that. Anything that goes that way is a result of smashing and separation hundreds of millions of years ago and then all the glacial stuff goes like that. Because between about 25,000 years ago and 11,000 years ago, a massive ice sheet centered on the Hudson Bay spread like pancake batter over the entire state, smoothing, scratching and scraping the rocks that made up the basement of the state and taking most of Canada and depositing all of that material here on your beach. So this is Canadian sand. So next time you're down at Old Orchard Beach, don't complain about those frostbacks. They just came to visit their sand, okay? All right, so during that period, I'm not gonna talk a lot about the ice, but what I'm gonna do is focus a little bit on that curve. The sea level curve that Dan Belknap and Joe Kelly have produced tells the story of how the continent was affected or this part of the North American continent was affected by the passage of the ice. And first of all, what the ice did with its enormous mass was compress the surface of the land downwards resulting in a relative sea rise, sea level rise. Okay, so if you look, you'll see that on the left hand end of that curve, the sea level is about 70 meters above its present level, okay? So about 70 meters above its present level and it stayed there for the duration of the ice age and up in the top left hand map with 14,000 before present on it, you can see what the ocean looked like. The reddish line is the coastline and you can see the whole of the coastal plain of Maine was totally inundated. As far inland as Bangor, everything north of I-95 was underwater and the evidence of that surrounds us constantly. If you go to a main farm, what do they grow best in Maine? In the inland farms, rocks, okay? And all those rocks are glacially born materials which have been deposited by melting ice. If you eat a clam, you know, when you pull that little sweatshirt off and swoosh him around in the clam juice, down at the bottom of the clam juice is that delicious gray, blue gray grit, just about the same color as Roger's pants and t-shirt there, there you are, thanks Roger. So just about that same blue gray color, that's the presumpscot formation, which is the ground up rock material that was formed by the passage of the glaciers over the landscape. Okay, so 14,000 years ago, the entire region was inundated. And if you look, 12,500 years ago, as the ice started to melt, that's the next diagram over on the right, we're going top left hand corner, moving rightwards, you can see that the edge of the continent is now way out in the ocean. If you've got really good eyes, I tried to pick out Long Island. It's a little gray splodge, the color of the presumpscot formation right there. You may need to look at it under a scrying glass when you get home. Okay, so 12,500 years ago, you would have been able to walk home to continental North America from Long Island. The whole of Casco Bay was dry land. And if you go to 12,000 years ago, what you can see is that the coastline was even further out. So Monhegan and Matinicus were part of the mainland and there were a few islands offshore that are now submerged. And the majority of the landscape that we now recognize as part of the island environment was part of the mainland. And 9,000 years ago, next diagram over, we can see the same thing once again. But here we see that the sea level is starting to rise again. The coast is slowly creeping towards the Northwest. And what's happening is first of all, the ice compresses the land up at 4,000 BP, then the ice melts, the land bounces upwards and then continuing melting ice starts to fill the ocean up again. So we've got a race between rebounding land and accelerating ocean influx. And by 9,000 BP, we can see that Casco Bay is starting to emerge. Long Island is still part of the mainland and there are a whole series of inlets and peninsulas and islands which now no longer exist. But about 9,000 years ago, when the early woodland native peoples were first in this region, much of what we now recognize as ocean was dry land. And my archeological colleagues tell me that the majority of Native American habitations from this period are almost certainly now underwater. And every now and again, a fisherman or a dragger or somebody like that will pull up a bunch of arrowheads or a fishing canoe or some evidence of human habitation. Okay, 5,000 years ago, we can see that Casco Bay is starting to emerge into its present form. And then in the present, we can see that the coastline as we now recognize it is visible. Okay, so what's interesting about this sequence of maps for me, first of all is it's way cool that I can make these now, you know? It's just really fun. And so instead of having a real job, I spend a lot of my time just mucking around, you know? And they still give me a check every month. It's awesome. For those of you who've had a career in science, I have a theory about scientists. The theory is, and if you look at a university, if you go into the department of humanities, particularly the English literature or the history or the political science or something like that, there's a whole bunch of people in there who got stuck at age 14 or 15 because they think their feelings are really important and they really matter a whole lot. And if you go into the science wing or the engineering department, what you find is everybody got stuck at about 11 and they spend the whole life just saying, this is so cool. Oh wow. And if you go into the administration offices, you find a whole bunch of people who are stuck at three and what they're saying is, the peas are touching the carrots. I can't eat it. So anyway, apologies to any university administrators who are here. Of course, I have nothing but respect and affection for the extraordinary work that you do. And I was just kidding. Don't tell my boss I said any of that. Okay, so what's interesting about this, apart from just mucking around and having a good time, is that it's possible now to animate this. So I can actually produce an animation that shows 15 or 16,000 years of Earth history based on Belknap and Kelly's curve. And one of the things you notice about that is there are periods of time when things change very slowly and there are periods of time when things change very fast indeed. And the current thinking is that there were periods of time when rather than thousands of years separating events in the historical sequence, there were perhaps tens of years. So maybe in a 50 year period, the ice retreated from close to the coast to somewhere up in the central region of the state, okay? And maybe over a 100 year period, it went from there all the way up to the St. John River Valley and we're still dialing in some of those dates. But this means that if we think about this in terms of a human lifespan, rather than looking at millions of years as we do for structural geology or hundreds of thousands of years as we do for glacial periods, suddenly when we talk about 50 years, we're looking at a human lifespan. Perhaps if we look at the Native American population a generation or two. So we're looking at a time when environmental change is catastrophic and extremely rapid rather than something which occurs on a continent wide or global scale. And that brings me to section C. And section C is based on some data from my own work, actually on the other side of the Atlantic. And you have to turn the map sideways to see that. It's a squiggly graph, the extreme right hand panel. And I hope you've got good eyesight. This is as much as I could fit on eight and a half by 11, which is a maximum size of my color printer. But if you look at this graph, what I have here is a data set that I downloaded from NOAA that was produced by my colleague Paul Majewski up at, and his colleague Majewski and Mika. I think Majewski's the head guy, Mika did the writing. Majewski got the money. That's how that usually works. But Paul Majewski, pretty sharp guy, head of the Climate Change Institute up at R&O. What he did was take a look at sodium on the Greenland ice cap. So he drilled down through the Greenland ice cap and looked at the annual layering of ice accumulation. And looking at that annual layering of ice accumulation, he was able to extract a salt sample from each stratum of ice. And he reasoned that each salt signature told the story of storminess, how much storminess occurred. And basically the idea is when there's a big storm, all the salt waves get blown up in the air, ends up sitting on the ice, and if there's a lot of it, wow, there were a lot of storms. And if there wasn't much of it, there weren't so many storms. And you can see it produces, in the background, I've got a sort of pale green curve and that's the original signature. And working from somebody else's method, I used a five-year rolling average to produce the blue curve. And basically, when it goes up towards the top of the graph, there were more storms. And when it goes down towards the bottom of the graph, there were less storms. All right, so I'm gonna use some technical terminology here. If I confuse or lose anybody, I'll try to translate it into something even more confusing and ambiguous. Okay, so on the left-hand side, it's not very squiggly. Everybody still with me? Okay, good. And on the right-hand side, it is way the heck squiggly. Way the heck squiggly. And getting way the heck squigglier. Okay, so on the left-hand side, what we can say is it was a bit less stormy. And on the right-hand side, we can say it was a bit more stormy. And you can see there is an orange line which from the left-hand side of the graph slopes downwards. And then right around 1425, it starts to trend upwards again. And that's the cumulative deviation from the mean. Okay, yes? Start out the lights and we're home. So connectivity to that? Not quite, but both caused by the same event, we suspect. So 1425, or thereabouts, is the height of the little ice age, okay? And that was when the European settlement finally got off by the Scralings or the Inuit people, and when it was finally impossible for them to survive, we think. So what you can see here is the cumulative deviation from the mean has a downward trend throughout what's called the medieval climate anomaly, the medieval period of global warming, okay? And it gets less and less stormy throughout the North Atlantic until we hit the height of the little ice age, the coldest point of the little ice age, right around 1425. And then, wow, it starts to get really stormy. And what's interesting is that increase in storminess, the trend of increasing storminess starts in the little ice age when it was unusually cold. And it continues despite the fact that the little ice age ended and it continues upwards into the modern era, into the era of global warming. And if there are any doubters in the room, I'm gonna tell you, it really is changing. It really is getting warmer. The climate is changing and it's getting warmer. There is no debate in the scientific community. No credible scientist anywhere argues otherwise, okay? So what we can see is an upward trend of storminess. And in no way related to Casco Bay at all, but of general interest because I did the work, down along the bottom, or I did some of the work, down along the bottom, you can see some little dots. And the little red dots were produced by a woman called Summerville. And the little black triangles were produced by my colleague, Jerry Bigelow of Bates College and a group out of the University of Glasgow. And what those are, each one represents a dated sand deposit using optically stimulated luminescence, which is the standard technique now. You don't need to know the details of that. All we need to know is that these are dated sand deposits. In other words, a big pile of sand somewhere that somebody has a date on. We know when that sand got blown into a big pile. And those dated sand deposits are all from the Shetland Islands where Jerry and I and a number of other people have been working for the last seven or eight years. Jerry's been there about 15 years, but this project's been going on for seven or eight years now. Okay, and what you notice is that during the medieval climate anomaly, there are a whole lot less dots on the left-hand side of the graph. So there are less sand deposits, but as storminess increases on the right-hand side of the graph, there are a whole bunch more of those dots. And there's a particular cluster right around the 1500s, and there's another cluster right around between about 1690 and about 1750. And the work we're doing at the moment is looking at the destruction of Shetland farmsteads, one farmstead in particular, during that period of extreme storminess when villages were covered with blowing sand and completely inundated. So that's how I passed my time when I'm not doing this sort of thing. Yes? I'm approximately 19 years old. Yes? I'm in the weather management station, historically. In the 1900s? Yeah, this way. Yeah, if you look from the 1900s forward, there's a huge increase, and certainly there's a much better record of storminess during that period, just because it's during what we call the instrumental period. So we've actually got meteorological records of storms, but there are also some notable storm events which have occurred during that period and the available evidence that we have seems to suggest that storms are more violent and more frequent. And one of the projects that we're talking about right now is trying to figure out how to study that. And one of the things that we grapple with is what's called cross-scalar analysis. And cross-scalar analysis is basically the problem that you run into. You drill a hole in the Greenland ice sheet and look at the salt. What you record is a year of many storms or perhaps a year with one really big storm. It's a stormy year, but what defines a stormy year was it one massive storm? Was it lots of smaller storms? We don't know, we're just calling it a stormy year. More salt ended up on the ice. But when we're looking at the records of the sand dunes, we're actually crawling around on our hands and knees, hammering pipes and yanking out sand samples, and we're capturing individual storm events. And when we look during the instrumental period, we find that within each storm event, there are multiple episodes of high-velocity wind and destructive events, okay? So if you experience a storm, you know, you can stand, particularly if you're in a boat, a moment of calm, wham, it all goes crazy again. Settles down again, boom, everything's all over the place. Okay, so one of the challenges of cross-scalar analysis is we end up looking in the proxy record, the record of things like salt on ice, whatever, forum and ifra, people look at, my favorite one are the guys who look at beetle genitals in middens, you know, Siberian versus European beetles, whatever. Apparently the ones from cold weather, anyway. But the proxy records tend to capture big trends over large periods of time and space. And the kinds of work that we're able to do looking at things like optically stimulated luminescence dates, OSL dates from sand, capture individual events. And there isn't really a consistent and strong method for compressing all of those different scales of analysis into a single answer. And you know, right now, a lot of the work I'm doing is trying to come up with methods for producing simulations of storm events in locations that are of interest based on some of the GIS technologies I use to try and sort of leapfrog between the instrumental period and the long-term proxy records. In terms of the spike that's going on in the 90s, yeah. We know that there were a whole bunch of incredibly severe storms there. And we think there's another episode of very high storminess going on right now. In Shetland, there were several very, very violent storms during that period. And we still haven't untangled the argument about why the Ice Age produced more violent storms and global warming. Cooling produces more storms and warming. It's counterintuitive. But there's a big discussion going on about that in the literature. I read those papers. I don't have anything to say about them except, wow, those guys are smart. Okay, so let's take a look at that curve. What this curve tells us is the third chapter of our history of the Main Coast. We looked at massive millions and tens of millions of years scale to produce the skeleton. We looked at hundreds of thousands of years or thousands of years to produce the Ice Age and the sea level change. And what we see now is a period of less than 1,000 years from 680 to 2,000. And during that period of time, we can see a series of changes that are underway that bring us back all the way to Picture A, the city of Portland, overlaid with the flood predictions. What we know of Casco Bay right now is it has changed on occasion, dramatically and rapidly. For example, at the end of the last Ice Age and during major episodes of sea level rise and sea level fall. We also know from all of the other data that are available to us that we are currently in a period of dramatic change in the environment. So much so that the British Geological Survey has finally bitten the bullet and defined for the first time in about 70 years a new geological period. We are now living in the Anthropogene, okay? So the Anthropogene is the bit of Earth history in which human beings seem to be providing the most visible and enduring changes that we will see in the geological record. And if we want some good evidence of the Anthropogene, once again, as I suggested when I started out a few minutes ago, we can simply look around us at this landscape. If we look at the barren grass here, we can see the evidence that the folks who live on this island are trying to vegetate this surface to protect against increasing storminess and rising sea levels. We know the sea level is rising, we know the storminess is increasing, and we can see the impact around us constantly. If you have beachfront property, enjoy it. If you don't have beachfront property, you will soon. We know that these changes are underway. We don't know if there's anything, as human beings, we can do to mitigate them. We don't know if we can stop this process. We're currently in the middle of one of the most extensive and enormous experiments that we've ever undertaken. And there's no control group. And the people who are running the experiment don't really know what they're doing. And no null hypothesis has really been defined. And we don't have a good prediction of what the outcome will look like. We do know that the predictions that we do have that document the kind of changes that are going on are pretty good ones. So if you look at the flood predictions from the city of Portland, produced by my student, Nasa Scheer, at the Portland City Office of GIS in pale blue and produced by the National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration in the dark blue, you'll see right in the middle of that, there's a little red dot. Anybody know what that little red dot is? That's Whole Foods. With anybody down there in September last year? Okay, so our guys dialed it right in. So we know what's happening and we can see the change. My only hope is the organization such as yours that are actually taking the time to look at the landscape in which you live and making some effort to preserve at least some of it from catastrophic change are successful. Because if you're not, we're gonna have some very interesting times ahead of us. Thank you, any questions? I'm now with Chris McDuffie. Hi. Hi, it's great that you're here and visiting on this beautiful beach with us today. 34 years you've been doing this. Isn't that remarkable? I agree. A long time and now you're jumping ship. I am. Well, I thought when I had my 70th birthday, it was probably time to hand it over to younger people. But by you're going off the board and you've been on the board all those years, it doesn't mean you're not gonna be involved. No, that's right. I care passionately about this island and the whole bay and the work that Oceanside has done and continues and will do more of in the future. Well, and your name is so connected with Oceanside. I think that we think of you when we think, who can we go to? You and... Well, and Roger of course has been there even longer than I actually with this organization. But I would like to say that this year we accomplished accreditation with the national accreditation, which is a huge victory for us and for the longevity of this organization. It really guarantees the permanence of all of our work and that is what it is all about. When I first was involved in saving Fowler's Beach, they introduced the term conservation easement. I had no idea what a conservation easement was. Neither did anybody else. It was really quite a new phenomenon at that time and we've learned well the lesson of the value of conservation easements to continue our work long after we're no longer here and that's so important to me and to all of us who do this work. To all of us, thank you so much Chris for all you've done. All these years and we'll continue to do. Thank you. I'm now with Roger Burley, who is the president of Oceanside Conservation Trust. Hi Roger. Hi Leslie. Chris McDuffie just mentioned something that's huge for your organization and that is accreditation. That is new to the organization and it was not easy to come by. Do you wanna say a little bit about that? That is correct. The accreditation comes from the Land Trust Alliance which is the national organization which kind of organizes and sets the standards and practices for all the land trusts in the United States. And this all came about not too long ago because down in the Washington DC Virginia area there were people who were getting tax benefits from supposedly contributing land and money to conservation but were really feathering their own nest. And so both the IRS and the Congress got wind of this because it was in the newspapers down that way and they decided that something had to be done about it. So they set up an accreditation process and I've lost track of how many land trusts in the nation and in Maine are accredited but in Maine there's maybe 15 out of about 90. And so those of us who have gone through that have worked really, really hard to do everything that they have told us to do and then were tested on it. We were seriously tested on it and we were rejected the first time. We were, there was one little blip in our process and we were rejected. So we had to go back to work for two more years and do it right and we corrected not only the one thing that we'd done wrong. It's actually a pretty minor thing to us but we went over all of our standards and practices a second time and got it right and we'll have to do it again in about four and a half more years. But at least you've been accredited once and you've been through the process, you know how to do it and what a great cause. Well, again, as I said before the meeting that this stuff is permanent. What we do is permanent and to do it right and if we're all hit by a ferry on the way home today, the next board of directors will have an organization that is doing exactly what it should be doing. They can pick up the pieces and go for it. They can move right in and help to protect what's sitting right here in front of us and under our feet, something that is just beyond price. The only thing that's gonna change these properties is what we just heard about climate change, global warming and rising sea levels. And until we take that seriously, it's not gonna happen. We've got to, across the board in this world, take climate change seriously. And whatever our next president might do or not do, may or may not make anywhere near as much difference as the number of people buying cars in India and China and thousands of other factors around the globe, including population. Population increase is probably the biggest. Because eventually they'll all have cars and be driving them around. Well, thank you for this little bit of the world and what you're doing to make it here for all of us to enjoy and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and on and on and on. Well, it's beautiful and we're happy to be working with beauty every day. Thank you.