The first humans to lay eyes on what would eventually become Annapolis, more than 10,000 years ago, likely gazed upward and saw it as a ridge above a wide river valley that led out to the Atlantic Ocean. Over millennia, fresh water from the rivers and creeks of the coastal plain and salt water from the sea devoured the shoreline, filled in the valley and created what we know as the Chesapeake Bay.

By the time the city was named Annapolis in 1694, the bay had reached its modern contours. Those contours continued to change at a pace slow enough that humans tended to perceive them as permanent, though that change has quickened.

Current-day Annapolis has become one of the most culturally important cities in Maryland. It has also become topographically impractical, prone to flooding during periods of heavy rainfall or high tide.

As the climate warms and the seas rise, the story of Annapolis is the story of many coastal places with proximity to the sea becoming more and more of a liability. The solutions are expensive and complicated and require sacrifices, often of the things we have built. Seen another way, they are not solutions at all, but just methods of buying time.

‘The water has to go somewhere’

About 10 months ago, Annapolis city officials announced a $72 million plan, called the City Dock Resiliency Project, to build a 2-acre water-absorbing park 8 feet above current sea level by City Dock, where there is now pavement that often goes underwater during particularly high tides. Mechanical and floating floodgates, raised bulkheads, and redesigned storm drains are part of the plan. In addition, the city has budgeted $18 million to address flooding on nearby Compromise Street. Construction is still set to begin after the fall boat show, with completion no earlier than mid-2026.

“The park is the main resiliency,” said Mitchelle Stephenson, public information officer for the city. She said the earthen berm is expected to absorb 100% of stormwater at City Dock.

The plan will require some armoring, the general term given to the building of structures and barriers against the water. Armoring has skeptics. Most coastal states have regulations discouraging it, favoring natural solutions referred to as living shorelines, which are most effective in protected waters like the Chesapeake. The living shoreline approach has been tested and is accepted by the mainstream nationally, said Matthew Fleming, the director of the Resilience Authority of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County.

The stakes change, he said, in cities, where physical barriers become a necessary evil. A living shoreline is not feasible in downtown Annapolis, so a raised park that acts as a giant sponge is the compromise.

“In urban centers, where space is at a premium, multiple uses and public amenities are in high demand, this dual-purpose approach with City Dock makes sense,” Fleming said. “Not only will it help to reduce the economic impacts to our local businesses, it also helps address social resilience by creating neighborhood gathering places and opportunities for diverse community members to interact.”

At the nearby Naval Academy, a $37 million project is already underway that includes raising the height of existing seawalls near Farragut Field and Santee Basin. That phase is “nearing completion” said Zoe Johnson, the community planning liaison officer at Naval Support Activities Annapolis. Construction to repair and protect Ramsey Road on College Creek will begin in the coming months, she said. Berms are also included in the academy’s long-term solution, but those are more than a decade away.

While storms get the most attention, routine high-tide flooding is also a growing problem in Annapolis, which is heading into its wettest time of year. Stephenson said sunny-day flooding is a far worse problem for Annapolis than storms. Annapolitans who have lived through a few seasons know the low spots that regularly go underwater and the corrosive effects of bay water dousing the undercarriages of their cars.

Sunny-day flooding in Annapolis has increased by 900% the past 20 years, said Allison Colden, a marine scientist and the Maryland director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

“The Chesapeake is a very interesting place from a climate change and biogeographical perspective,” she said. “We are right on the line between temperate and tropical ecosystems. This region is really kind of ground zero for the most important changes we anticipate seeing related to climate change.”

For Colden, who lives in Annapolis, flood warnings have become routine.

“The focus has been on just stopping the water, but the water that we see coming in today is just the beginning of what we will continue to see in the future,” she said. “If you build a seawall, you will just deflect that water to another place that doesn’t have a seawall. These decisions have to be made in a holistic way, otherwise we’re just chasing our tails. The water is not going anywhere, so if you build a wall the water has to go somewhere.”

In the bay ecosystem, underwater grasses grow in the shallows near the water’s edge and serve as a transition to saltwater marshes that form the edges of the shoreline. Those marshes gradually transition to forest. The marshes not only withstand floodwaters, they thrive in them.

“The trouble is that we’ve built homes and businesses and marinas where that transition zone used to be,” Colden said. “The best solutions will create ways for water to move the way it used to move naturally. That way, you rebuild the opportunity for the environment to handle the water instead of fighting that.”

Compounding the effect of sea-level rise is a process called subsidence. As we remove water from underground aquifers for agricultural and residential uses, the land settles and sinks to absorb the voids left behind.

“Coastal flooding is a concern for many of our counties,” Mike Hinson, the state’s chief resilience officer, said in a written statement. “The best option for long term resilience involves a comprehensive, adaptive approach that incorporates both traditional infrastructure improvements and nature-based solutions.”

A changing shoreline

The Chesapeake tidal region has always been a dynamic place, its shoreline constantly changing. The Native people of the area once easily walked to what are now islands. Joppa was once Maryland’s busiest seaport before agriculture and clear-cutting sent silt down the Gunpowder River and filled the harbor. Parsons Island, south of Kent Narrows, has been largely consumed by the bay; the remains of a well that was once in the middle of a farm were discovered 10 years ago in the surf off an eroding bank.

Smith Island, the last inhabited island in Maryland not accessible by road, is rapidly losing dry ground. With an average elevation of only a few feet, its chances of surviving into the next century are tenuous. Scientists expect sea levels on U.S. coastlines to rise a foot by 2050.

“The path to resilience will involve difficult decisions and significant investments,” Hinson said. “We may see conditions worsen before they improve, especially as we adapt to rising sea levels and increased storm intensity.”

The new Ryan Resilience Lab in Norfolk, Virginia, is planning the way ahead. The lab, which is part of the Elizabeth River Project to restore the urban river, was built along the river’s banks and designed to eventually be moved if the river rises as expected.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Annapolis headquarters was built in 2000 on marshland abutting a beach that employees often enjoy during lunch breaks. It survived two hurricanes largely because it was built to absorb tidal surges. The marsh was left mostly intact beneath and around the building. The parking lot is permeable and acts as an artificial wetland. While not constructed to move, the building was designed to roll with the punches that are sure to come.

‘Far removed from natural practices’

The Chesapeake, a drowned river valley, began forming 35 million years ago, when a meteor struck the earth near what is now Cape Charles, Virginia, creating a crater about the size of Rhode Island. The depression diverted rivers and triggered the conditions for the bay to form.

As the Ice Age ended and sea levels rose, the relatively shallow valley started to fill with water. The path of the submerged river (once joined to the current Susquehanna River) can still be detected as a narrow trench in the bottom of the bay that roughly aligns with the shipping lane, where depths approach 100 feet.

The first peoples of the Chesapeake go back at least 13,000 years, said Valerie M.J. Hall, a zooarchaeologist who has studied the interactions between humans and animals in the upper bay.

“An undeniable fact,” she said, “is that we are more far removed from natural practices than people on this landscape have ever have been.”

Her research indicated that precolonial people used the bay’s shoreline as “places of resource extraction,” like fishing camps. People harvested and smoked oysters near the shore, then transported them back to more permanent settlements farther upland.

“There was a lot of sophisticated decision making and adapting,” said Hall, who is completing her doctoral dissertation at the University of Maryland. “They lived in harmony with landscape for thousands of years. You can’t do that if you don’t have a sophisticated strategy for survival.”

Hall and her family are modern shore people, not upland people, residing south of Annapolis on the Shady Side peninsula near an armored shoreline. The sanctuary of lightly trafficked streets, play spaces and water views was formerly filled with summer cottages. It’s now showing increased signs of erosion.

Hall’s home lies in an evacuation zone, with only one road that crosses a creek leading out of their neighborhood. She and her husband have discussed whether to eventually move to higher ground, and they’ve purchased flood insurance.

“I absolutely love it here,” she said. “It does feel like home, but I don’t want to be complacent. The more I study it, the more it seems prudent to move to a place with more elevation.”

“Part of the hubris of being human is that we think we can control things, and we really can’t,” she added. “Going back to the indigenous way of thinking … if you respect the water as an agent of change as having its own power, you’re going to treat it differently and react to it differently, rather than thinking you can just put up a barrier and prevent the impacts.”