3 Millimeters

Three extra millimeters of water every year will make land vanish. It will swallow communities. It will change environmental habitats forever.

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A controlled burn on the marshes of Blackwater NWR on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The burning every spring helps new growth and solidifies the land against sea level rise which is twice the global average in this region.
An abandoned car is enveloped by phragmites near Deal Island, a harbinger of salt water intrusion in the soil.
Luxury condominiums sit on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay in Crisfield. The apartments were priced near $400,000, when they were built in 2009, but since then they still remain mostly empty and now they command less than half the price.
A dead tree inundated with salt water, is covered by high tide in the Kent Narrows on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Water spills onto Hoopers Island Road, up the coast from Crisfield, during high tide. The bay is a foot deeper than it was at the start of the 20th century, meaning that storm surges are higher, and land in the region is sinking.
Holly Summers is like many Crisfield residents, trying to figure out what to do with her home, which was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Water sits beneath the 130-year-old house, built by Kathy’s grandfather, and its foundation has shifted. “Your memories are in your heart; there's good ones,” her mother Kathy says. “But I'm getting older, and I don't know I want to [rebuild] after every storm.”
A black rat snake slithers across Maple Dam Road in Church Creek, Md. Many homes in the area of Church Creek, which neighbors Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, have been abandoned as the soil becomes more saturated with salt water and turns into marsh.

Greg Kahn

Greg Kahn (b. 1981) is an American documentary photographer. Kahn grew up in a small coastal town in Rhode Island, and attended The …

Topics
Environment
Sub Topics
Global Warming Human Impact Rising Sea Level
Regions
North America United States
Global Warming

About 3 Millimeters

Three extra millimeters of water every year will make land vanish.

It will swallow communities. It will change environmental habitats forever. For townspeople along the inner-coastal region of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, the impact of sea level rise is no longer an abstract worry debated by politicians. They see the land becoming more saturated beneath their feet. 3 Millimeters explores the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where the sea level is rising at twice the global average – a process without emergency brakes.

The project considers how a community’s identity, ever tied to the land, is evolving. It’s not the swift impact of a storm, but a slow drowning of a culture. These photographs depict the last breaths of a community as they are forced to adapt to the smallest but most devastating tidal wave.

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