Cape Cod: Exploring a Sense of Place
Origins: Forming the Land
Cape Cod is a peninsula, a 70-mile long arm that reaches out into the Atlantic, running more or less west to east for about 35 miles, and then flexing its arm at Orleans to turn northward to Provincetown at its tip. The Cape is a gift from the last Ice Age. As the Laurentide glaciers retreated about 9000 years ago, they left behind deposits of rock and debris, a glacial moraine that formed the Cape and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The part of the Cape closest to mainland Massachusetts, known as the Upper Cape, has gentle hills formed from debris pushed along by the glacier. The highest elevation on the Cape is here, 306 feet at Pine Hill in the town of Bourne. From the Upper Cape, the land slopes downward to the south and east. To travel east on Route 6, the Mid-Cape Highway, is to follow the ridge of the moraine.
Ever-changing Land
The glacier formed the terrain of the Cape in another way. Cape Cod is dotted with more than three hundred fresh water kettle ponds, the result of meltwater from huge chunks of ice stranded by the glacier. The ponds are deep enough that they connect with ground-water and are not fed or drained by streams. The ice sheet also left behind glacial erratics such as Doane Rock in Eastham and Hokum Rock in Dennis (shown right).
Cape Cod Landsat 7" by NASA/Landsat 7. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
The sea and wind constantly rearrange the coastline of Cape Cod. For example, the barrier islands of Monomoy, which hang like fringe from the elbow of the Cape at Chatham, have been built up, altered, and reshaped many times. Storms separated Monomoy Island into North and South Monomoy in 1978 and then reconnected South Monomoy to the mainland in 2006. The video shows the break that occurred in spring 2013. A new break occurred in January 2014.