Though it has been consistently occupied for nearly 200 years, this small, treeless island 20 miles off the coast of Maine has never been all that habitable to humans and is expected to become even less so.
Climate change is warming oceans around the world — almost nowhere as quickly as the Gulf of Maine — causing sea levels to rise and storms to retain their power as they venture north from the tropics. From the perspective of the small, environmentally minded college that runs research programs on Mount Desert Rock, that is all the more reason to maintain its presence on the low-lying, 3-acre isle.
“We have five decades of people who have cut their teeth on Mount Desert Rock and have gone off to do amazing things in the world,” Darron Collins, president of College of the Atlantic, said last week while sitting in his office at the school’s Bar Harbor campus. “That’s why we invest the money in the infrastructure out there.”
