For many, Tybee Island near Savannah is the go-to spot to spend a hot summer day on the beach. Every year, the long beachline attracts tourists from around the country to the sands.

However, there’s history sprinkled around the island that is now easier to find than ever before.

For the past few years, a team of researchers at ����Vlog has been collecting the stories and historic layout of the island. Specifically, landmarks from slavery and up to the Civil Rights Movement.

As a final product, the team launched a ; from the Lazaretto Creek quarantine station for enslaved people, to the Brown Cement Factory and other important sites on the island.

Georgia Southern’s Amy Potter, Ph.D., associate professor of geography, said the idea is for Tybee visitors as well as Savannah and Tybee residents to learn about this historically thriving population not often associated with the island, many of whom were also Gullah Geechee people.

“This is so important to our regional history,” said Potter. “We’re talking about those histories that were not that long ago. We were also thinking a bit more about what this community historically looked like and meant to the people who lived and worked here.”

The trail, which consists of 13 stops, features countless stories that bring these locations to life. Many of these stories were uncovered through personal interviews conducted by Potter and her then-student researcher Joyah Mitchell.

The Ellenwood, Georgia, native credits her passion for this field and the topic at hand for helping her overcome this shyness. As a result, she helped build a map of societies from the past. Now, she’s looking to build maps for societies of the future.

Today, Mitchell is an intern for the city of Douglasville, Georgia. While she helps run the office before heading off to graduate school, she takes in whatever she can as she begins her life in city planning.

On average, dozens of earthquakes occur every day, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. They can strike anywhere at any time. A majority of them aren’t felt by most people, but they’re detected by seismographs around the globe. Southeast Georgia experienced one on June 18. The 3.9 magnitude tremor was the state’s strongest in years. 

Earthquakes usually occur near the edges of tectonic plates. Why did it happen here?

We sit on a coastal plain, which is just layers of flat lying sedimentary rocks on top of ancient crustal rocks. And beneath us are these old buried faults left behind when the North American and African plates began to split apart. 

We had this colossal mountain range from 250 million years ago, which we call the Appalachians today, and then the tectonic plates reversed and they began to tear apart. This is called ‘rifting,’ and it has created big faults that run parallel to the mountain range. Eventually, the rifting got wide enough that it flooded. This is what made the Atlantic Ocean.

What methods are used to measure earthquakes? What do the measurements tell us?

We use the Richter Scale, which is used to measure the strength of a quake. The numbers which are used are actually exponents that represent orders of magnitude. An earthquake that registers as a 5.0 on the Richter Scale is 10 times stronger than a 4.0 and 100 times stronger than a 3.0. If you get above five, then the quakes start to become much more noticeable and you have more damage. Then, there are the big ones over magnitude 9.0 in Japan and Indonesia. So these are really, really large events.

Before seismograph instruments, there is another which goes from 1 to 12 called the Mercalli Intensity Scale. It was basically a survey of damage and what people felt. This is the scale that people can relate to. 

What do we know about the quake over the weekend? What information do you look for after a quake occurs?

When an earthquake goes off, look at the magnitude because that tells us how much energy was released as the rocks ruptured. Think of it like a small firecracker versus a 500-pound bomb. The more explosive you have in it, the more energy that’s going to get released. We had a magnitude 3.9; that’s small.

The other element is how deep it is. If there’s a bomb going off, where do you not want to be sitting? You don’t want to be sitting close to it. You want to be sitting as far away as possible. For an earthquake: the deeper it is, the less damage that will occur at the surface. If I look at a quake and it’s 20 miles deep versus 100, that says a lot.

The one over the weekend happened less than a mile below the crust in Metter, Georgia. It was really shallow. That’s one reason why we felt it more. Even though it was a small magnitude, it was so close to the surface that it was much more noticeable than if the same magnitude occurred ten miles deep. It’s still an earthquake, but it’s how close you are to it. It makes a big difference.

Is there a way of knowing how dangerous a future earthquake can be?

Not really. What we can do is look at the past. We know that there was a 7.3 magnitude quake in Charleston in 1886, and we know what the shaking was here. So that’s about all we can prepare for is a similar one, because it happened in the past. That doesn’t mean you can’t have one bigger, but the best answer is we use the past.

Are earthquakes becoming more frequent?

No, but we’ve got to keep in mind that we’re talking about things that happen over geologic time. A million years is kind of a short interval in terms of geology. We’ve only been measuring these things for a couple of hundred years. So, we have just a very small window and that’s very hard to do statistics when the frequency is so low. For the West Coast, the frequency of earthquakes is so high that we can make some projections, but it’s a very different situation.

����Vlog ecohydrology professor John Van Stan, Ph.D., recently published an article in Nature Geoscience titled “Significant Contribution of Non-vascular Vegetation to Global Rainfall Interception.” Van Stan, along with Philipp Porada, Ph.D., from the University of Potsdam in Potsdam, Germany, and Axel Kleidon, Ph.D., from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, studied the effects of nonvascular vegetation, such as lichens and mosses, on precipitation and the water cycle. The article details how the researchers used a numerical computer simulation model to find that lichens and mosses are responsible for a large share of the global interception of rainfall. Due to the effects of lichens and mosses, simulated interception increased by 60 percent. This contribution has so far not been considered in global land surface models, which simulate the water cycle and temperature at the land surface. “While our attention has been on more charismatic vegetation like forests, the little guys, like lichens and mosses, have been doing some heavy lifting in the global water cycle,” Van Stan said. Lichens and mosses can be found around the world as the dominant form of vegetation in deserts and as epiphytes, a non-parasitic plant that grows on another plant, on trees in forests. These organisms can absorb a lot of water and thereby, capture rainfall before it reaches the ground, then evaporate it away before it can infiltrate the soil. “If the global biomass of lichens and mosses changes as a result of climate change or land use change, this will have consequences for the global water cycle and the land surface temperature,” Porada said. Van Stan is not finished with his research on lichens, mosses, and other epiphytes, like Spanish moss and resurrection fern. Next spring, he will begin collecting data for a project with the Savannah Tree Foundation and Georgia Conservancy to estimate the monetary value of the ecoservices provided by Savannah’s epiphytes. ����Vlog, a public Carnegie Doctoral/Research institution founded in 1906, offers 141 degree programs serving more than 27,000 students through nine colleges on three campuses in Statesboro, Savannah, Hinesville and online instruction. A leader in higher education in southeast Georgia, the University provides a diverse student population with expert faculty, world-class scholarship and hands-on learning opportunities. Georgia Southern creates lifelong learners who serve as responsible scholars, leaders and stewards in their communities. Visit GeorgiaSouthern.edu.