 If you could please introduce yourself. Oh yes, sir. Hi, I'm Sarah Cody. I'm the Historic Preservation Chief for Miami-Dade County. I hope you are. Archaeologists have identified over 16,000 cultural resources in the state of Florida at risk due to the effects of climate change. In Miami, a mere six feet above sea level on average, a natural phenomenon known as the kingtides is causing historic preservationists to rapidly develop solutions for the mitigation of sea level rise and storm surge. The scientific name for a kingtide is a perigee and springtide, and it's essentially when the orbits and alignments of the sun, the moon, and the earth all coincide. And kingtides are the highest predicted ocean tides that take place in the calendar year. They're exceptionally high tides. They cause local flooding, mostly along low-lying coastal areas, and because the average daily water levels continue to rise as the oceans rise, high tides can reach further and extend higher than ever before. And sea level rise induced by climate change is expected to lead to more frequent and higher kingtides over time. Kingtides are part of larger climate change, right? The tides are getting bigger and stronger and more frequent during this part of the year, something we also saw just this week. So I'm actually recording this after the devastation of Hurricane Ian to Southwest Florida. And here in Southeast Florida and in the Miami area, what we're seeing is that the kingtides are actually supercharged by the storm. So we're seeing increased water levels because of the cumulative impact of both Hurricane Ian and of the kingtides. And obviously with climate change, as we all know, hurricanes will get bigger, stronger, and potentially more destructive. The kingtides, they make visible sea level rise encroaching on these historic and prehistoric sites. Without the kingtides, the visualization of the risk would not be as possible. It makes everything more of an emergency. It's more pressing. And it helps other people to understand that sea level rise is happening now and it's not happening in the future. Are the kingtides part of any larger environmental changes within the climate crisis and if they are, how so? Yes. So as we all know, human activities are the main driver for climate change. And in essence, what we're seeing with kingtides is exactly what climate change has done and will continue to do. Increase the sea and groundwater levels. So with that comes increased storm surges, inundation of lower line wetlands, eroding shorelines, and saltwater intrusion into estuaries and aquifers. The kingtides in Florida in particular create massive issues when it comes to red tide and dangerous toxic algal blooms that spread from one coast to the other across these inlets from Lake Okeechobee. So they have created wider environmental problems that are disconnected. So in one way, the toxic algal blooms and eutrophication that we have from sugarcane runoff from pesticides shouldn't be related to climate change, but the kingtides are affecting this hugely in Florida. As a coastal community, Miami and South Florida in general have always been vulnerable to flooding. But we've become more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and sea level rise. And climate change and higher kingtides present a unique challenge to our cultural resources. And that's why the Miami Indian County Office of Historic Preservation has performed a vulnerability assessment to identify which of our historic resources are the most at risk for flooding. And we're currently conducting a vulnerability assessment to do the same for archeological and paleontological sites. One of my favorite sites to visit and work on in Miami-Dade is the Bill Bags Cape Florida State Park. So this park is famous for its lighthouse. People love lighthouses, right? It has the beautiful daymark, which is just the white paint. And I'm interested in preserving this site because it's so much more than just the lighthouse, right? We have thousands of years of occupation ranging from a tequesta middens at the site through its historic buildings. This site was also really important as part of a saltwater railroad. So this was a way that freedom seekers traveled south and east to the Bahamas across the water. So people were trying to escape and find their freedom. And I think that aspect of the site is really interesting, right? And that's something we're losing. Another aspect of the site is that you can really see the impacts of climate change at the site. So there is a US Coast Guard survey marker that was placed there in 1855. And when the survey marker was placed, it was placed on dry land, obviously. And when they relocated it in the 1980s, it was actually underwater out in the middle of this game bay practically. So they have moved it back to dry land. But who knows how long that area will be dry and above the water for. Built in 1825 and sending 100 feet tall, visitors can reach the top of the Cape Florida Lighthouse for a view of Biscayne Bay in Miami by climbing 109 steps. The Cape Florida Lighthouse and its surrounding areas within Bilbag State Park have a long and complex history. During Spanish Florida, this area was a refuge for self-liberated enslaved Africans and a launch point to reach freedom in the Bahamas. After the US acquired Florida from Spain and began the Seminole War, the lighthouse was attacked and its light was extinguished between 1836 and 1846. It was fortified and rebuilt in 1847. While it was briefly recommissioned between 1978 and 1998, it was ultimately replaced by the offshore Fowley Rocks lighthouse in 1878. The Cape Florida Lighthouse and its surrounding areas have already felt the effects of sea level rise, with historic preservationists working hard for decades to ensure it remains standing for future generations. I care about all historic sites and prehistoric sites, but in particular the ones that I care about the most are the ones that are called tequesta sites, particularly in the Everglades and around downtown, that there has been attempts at protecting not always successful and the future of these sites, many of them right on the edge of the Miami River or right on Biscayne Bay. Dating back roughly 2000 years, the Miami Circle was uncovered in 1998 by archaeologist Bob Carr. Before colonization by waves of European and American settlers, South Florida was stewarded by a number of indigenous groups, including the tequesta. Like other cultures native to South Florida, tequesta people were a complex, non-agricultural society who developed ceremonial architecture, were skilled artisans at carving wood and bone, and had wide-ranging trade networks, with some artifacts from the Miami Circle sourced from places as far away as modern-day Missouri and Georgia. The Miami Circle is thought to be the ceremonial complex of a larger tequesta settlement spanning both sides of the river and was the center of an intense preservation battle during its excavation. It is now a public park under the care of the Florida Division of Historic Resources. Archaeologists believe that tequesta people, whose population was already dwindling at the time of European contact, were driven to Cuba by the Spanish. Seminole and Mikosuki people, as well as other survivors of Spanish occupation, continued to use the river for travel and trade into recent history. The site continues to hold a deep spiritual significance for many indigenous people throughout the Americas to this day. It's really difficult to kind of pick one site or pick a few sites to say, oh, we're most interested in preserving this one. All of our designated sites are significant in some way, otherwise they wouldn't be designated. And, you know, the county, we have so many significant historic cultural archeological and paleontological resources that date as far back as 10,000 years. So with that said, I will say that the Deering Estate is a really good example of a significant coastal site. In our vulnerability assessment, it was ranked as the second most vulnerable historic site in the county. And what's particularly interesting about it is that it has very significant historic and archeological resources within the same site. So understanding the political challenges of a sea level rise initiative, working with the Deering Estate to create a pilot project, where we could really show people the plight on county historic resources would be a really valuable way to highlight the significance of these sites and their vulnerability in a changing climate. As a primary tourist attraction in one of the county's most exposed sites, the Deering Estate would really provide an excellent platform to develop some kind of sea level rise outreach program to an audience that's already receptive to the goals of historic preservation. And our office is actually currently working with the Deering Estate and with the University of Florida on a grant funded project to do exactly that. We're going to be doing free modeling of a portion of these states and showing exactly what the site would look like as the sea levels continue to rise. The Deering Estate is an historic house as well as a nature preserve located in South Dade, Miami Dade County. The Stone House was built by industrialist Charles Deering in 1922. In addition to these resources, the Deering Estate's grounds include archeological sites dating to the Seminole War, Florida's Spanish colonial era, the Tequesta Inhabitation of South Florida, and even older time periods. One of Miami's best kept secrets, the Cutler Fossil Site, is also found on the grounds of the Deering Estate. The Cutler Fossil Site is a sinkhole with both paleontological remains from Florida's Ice Age as well as evidence of later human use as a hunting ground. Its human use dates to roughly 9,700 years ago, a time period known in Florida as the Late Archaic Era. The Ice Age animals found at the Cutler Fossil Site include the remains of an American lion, dire wolves, cave bears, and other megafauna. While many of its oldest sites are located on the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, an unusually high outcropping of limestone, the Deering Estate is nonetheless close to sea level and most of its cultural resources are extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, hence its participation in Miami Dade's pilot study. While not all of Florida's cultural resources can be saved in their entirety, archaeologists and preservationists are working hard to defend them from storm surge, record sites in detail, and preserve their stories. Because I'm at a university, I have had the fortune of being able to apply for grant money that has helped create the Coastal Heritage at Risk Task Force, where the acronym is CHART, which has brought together people from the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Seminole Tribal of Florida, members from the Mikosuki Tribe, as well as academics from across different institutions, museums, county archaeologists, county preservation boards, as we try to assess what sites are most at risk, and more than anything else, we want to tell the stories of some of these sites before they go underwater. We're trying to assess what sites will disappear and what sort of stories do these sites represent that people otherwise don't even know about as these sites disappear underwater. So here at the Florida Public Archaeology Network, one of the things we try and do annually is actually visit a number of archaeological sites every year during the Kingtides. And what we're hoping to achieve with that is to view what the archaeological site or the historic building might look like in the future as sea levels rise with climate change or what the site might look like with significant flooding during a major storm event. So when we go out to do these visits, sometimes portions of the site can be totally inaccessible due to flooding. Sections of the site might be underwater. It makes it more difficult to do our work during a Kingtide because of obviously the increased amount of water on the site. One of the major programs that the Florida Public Archaeology Network has to address and raise awareness of climate change is our Heritage Monitoring Scouts program. So this was developed by Sarah Miller, who's the director of our Northeast and East Central offices. And it empowers people to document the impacts of climate change to archaeological sites, historic buildings, historic cemeteries, really any of our heritage sites that are being impacted by climate change. Participating in that program is a great way for people to learn more about the day-to-day effects of climate change on specific sites near them. Our past has so much to do with our future, and we have so much we can learn from our past. There's so much more to understand about what came before as we look forward and we think about how do we deal with all of these environmental justice issues, these climate justice issues today as climate change encroaches on us. Things, whether they be an archaeological site, a historic building, or a historical cemetery, all of these things are preserved because people cared enough about them to reach out to legislators, to reach out to leaders in their community and say, this is something that is a critical part of my identity and it needs to be preserved for the future. When we think about climate change, we think about it as something that's going to impact our future, maybe, and it's obviously impacting our present, but it's destroying evidence of our past as well and we're losing the information about who we are and where we come from. It's very important for people to understand that historic preservation is not insular. What I mean by that is historic preservation is an essential part of any field or any project that deals with the built environment. We have to start to get away from thinking of historic preservation as trying to save a particularly beautiful building or a particularly beautiful site and start looking at historic preservation as how can we leverage the power of our historic cultural and archaeological sites in a way that creates better, more equitable and more resilient communities for our residents.