Troxler says restoration can help slow peat collapse. TIFFANY TROXLER: “Thousands of years to accumulate.” This stuff takes a very long time to accumulate.”
TIFFANY TROXLER: “That’s a great way to think about it. So if you squeeze it, you can compress it down to something much smaller in size.”ĪMY GREEN: The peat is dense and richly black, made of decomposed plant remains that have piled up layer upon layer over centuries.ĪMY GREEN: “Is this kind of like looking at an Everglades time capsule?” TIFFANY TROXLER: “You can feel it’s spongy, and it holds a lot of water. You get some larger ponds, but you see a number of sawgrass pedestals that remain.”ĪMY GREEN: Troxler kneels, reaches into the water and retrieves a fistful of the soil at the bottom, peat. TIFFANY TROXLER: “The collapse here is, it’s patchy. She and I are stepping precariously across a series of wooden and aluminum boards forming a narrow bridge across a 10 foot-by-10-foot hole of water, basically, that has opened up here in the sawgrass. Bravo.”ĪMY GREEN: Tiffany Troxler is the science director at the Sea Level Solutions Center in the Institute of Environment at Florida International University. But yes, you fell through a hole, a common occurrence in Everglades field research. So I don’t think you fell all the way to the limestone. TIFFANY TROXLER: “That is some of the peat, and the limestone is about, I don’t know, five feet below us right now. It’s so cool and refreshing.”ĪMY GREEN: “OK, I just fell in almost to my waist, but I’m back now. Literally.ĪMY GREEN: “The water feels great. Listen by clicking on the player above or read the transcript below.ĪMY GREEN: Just off the main road through the sawgrass prairie of Everglades National Park …ĪMY GREEN: “I’m stepping very carefully because I do not want to fall in the water.”ĪMY GREEN: … the river of grass is collapsing. WMFE environmental reporter Amy Green wades into the controversy around one of the most ambitious environmental restoration efforts ever undertaken. Welcome to the first episode of DRAINED, a podcast from WMFE and the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, about the massive plan to save the Everglades. A lot of the problems have to do with massive efforts to drain and replumb Florida’s most important water resource, an ecosystem unlike any other on Earth. In Everglades National Park, parts of the river of grass are collapsing – literally.