New England's Worst Sea Monster

Massachusetts has several sea monsters in her history.

Daniel Webster saw a sea serpent off of Duxbury, and Gloucester had numerous modern serpentine sightings. Moby Dick is tied to us to a small extent, and Jaws is tied to us to a great extent. We are the new, hip place for Great White Sharks to go, and we even had a Killer Whale in town last week. Lovecraft knew what he was doing when he put Arkham in Massachusetts.

However, our nastiest, ickiest sea monster is larger than a Blue Whale, and the only thing on Earth larger than it is a distant cousin of it. 

There's no way to avoid it, as it goes where the ocean pushes it. We have no sensors to detect the presence of it, and we don't know if one is around until people start being injured by the hundreds. 

Bullets don't harm it, a missile would go right through it, it survived an asteroid strike and you can hack it to pieces without lessening the danger it poses. Oh yeah, it's positively dripping with poison. It may also be immortal.

It'd take a shipload of Hit Points to kill one of those, huh? Thankfully, Godzilla incinerated this monster with his nuclear fire-breath in that 1970s movie, right? Wait... what??

It's real???

No...

Yes.

This monster that we speak of is a Lion's Mane Jellyfish. The LJM is a species of Cnidarian, a phylum that encompasses the Jellyfish family.

It is prevalent in the northern Atlantic, as it prefers colder water. They can not tolerate warmer waters, and are rarely found below 42 degrees north latitude. They dine on zooplankton, just like other giant creatures do. They are pelagic (open ocean) for most of their lives, but they tend to drift into bays as the currents dictate.

It is the largest known jellyfish, and holds the World's Largest Thing title if you don't count stretched-out Bootlace Worms. Massachusetts holds the world record for LJM (and, thusly, everything else), a feat they performed when a LJM washed ashore in a town that I cant find the name of. If anyone knows, hit me up in the comments.

This Lion's Mane Jellyfish that washed up in Massachusetts was 7 feet across. The tentacles, when stretched out, were over 120 feet long. The largest Blue Whales are about 20 feet shorter. That's a lot of jelly! You'd have to slaughter every character that Charles Schultz ever drew to make a corresponding amount of Peanuts Butter to get a PB&J out of that sucker, and that's before we find a football field's worth of bread to house the whole sandwich.

Most of that length is Tentacle, and each of those tentacles is lined with poisonous barbs that would break off into human skin quite nicely. The barbs get fired off like harpoons any time something- like you- touches the tentacle. The poison, while generally not fatal to a healthy adult, can cause critical burns. A jellyfish has thousands of such tentacles.

Now, something like that floating around in the middle of the ocean isn't much of a problem for most of us, and is just a small part of the general Cowardice that keeps me from doing things like Carnival Cruises or joining the Navy. 

However, there is nothing to stop one of these creatures from washing ashore in Massachusetts. What beach it hit depends entirely on the currents.

from USGS

"Washes ashore in Massachusetts" doesn't mean "one washed up here, once, in 1870." We are well within the range of these things, and they have inflicted mass injury in New England before.

Rye, New Hampshire is a nice place to go beaching. However, it wasn't so nice in July of 2010. A LMJ the size of a trash can lid with 20-25 foot tentacles washed into a group of bathers. Officials attempted to remove it, which only broke it up into innumerable pieces.

This, plus the wave action that breaks jellyfish apart, loosed the barbs from the tentacles, and the sea around Rye was a puddle of pain. The barbs can sting long after the jellyfish is dead, and long after their removal from the host creature.

Thinking that the danger had passed, bathers in Rye went back into the water... water that was filled with microscopic, poisonous, floating barbs. Over 150 people were injured. 

Most of the injuries were minor, because, as bad as it was, swimming into a spread-out infestation of barbs is different than directly contacting a LJM and getting thousands of stings at once. Still, five people needed to be taken to the hospital. The rest were treated on-site with vinegar and baking soda. Old salts swear by meat tenderizer, as well.

As you can see from my handy map of the currents off Massachusetts, had that beast not become trapped in the surf off Rye, it very easily could have moved with the currents down the Massachusetts, visiting Boston, Plymouth, Cape Cod...

You won't know that it's here... until the screaming starts. If you see it, it's already too late.

photo by Dan Hershman

How Will Florence Impact Massachusetts?

Hurricane Florence is Carolina's problem, and we are most likely going to have a nice weekend.

The only Florence that Massachusetts will get is some very rough surf on the South Coast, Cape Cod and the Islands.

The surf should kick up Thursday, as swells from Florence arrive. With Flo expected to stall along the Carolina coast, the surf could be rough well into Sunday.

Whenever Florence eventually tires of the South, she may move up here as some rain. She will not be in tropical storm form when she does. The forecasters are thinking Tuesday on that.

That rain, as you see in the graph below, may not even make it to SE Massachusetts.

Otherwise, remember that one man's Category 4 hurricane is another man's sunny weekend if you go North enough. Just be careful in the water.

We'll have some of our people out at the beaches for a surf report or perhaps several.

Is A Dune As Good As A Seawall?

People who propose a strategy of not making seawall repairs need to take a good look at the picture above.

That is the former dune that was charged with protecting the parking lot at Duxbury Beach Park. The picture was taken shortly after the Blizzard of '78.

It was annihilated by the Blizzard, which had the strength of a weak hurricane. I lived there at the time, and these pictures have not been altered.

The same Blizzard didn't put a scratch on the seawall that stood 100 yards north. That seawall, shoddily built and not maintained at all, made it 40 more years and still stands today.

That dune not only protects the parking lot, it protects mainland Duxbury. As you can see, it doesn't do much protecting when a big storm comes around.

The picture below is taken from about the same vantage point. It shows what gets hit by waves once the dune is gone, with "what gets hit" meaning "Powder Point."

Much of Duxbury Beach is protected by dunes. A good portion of the spring season is spent restoring those dunes after the ocean has at them with winter storms.

Duxbury is protected by two barrier beaches. One is Duxbury Beach, and the other is Cape Cod. The protection from Cape Cod ends right about where those pictures were taken. North of that, Duxbury is hit by direct open-ocean waves.

The part of Duxbury Beach that has a seawall is the part if Duxbury Beach that needs a seawall. The seawall protects not only the Gurnet Road area, but the Powder Point area. It is also what stands between the sea and the school complex.

Dunes won't get the job done. They get leveled, and become a rapidly eroding sandbar. There is nothing to stop the waves at that point.

As you can see, those waves will hit either Duxbury Beach or Powder Point. You can decide which at the next town election.