Split Rock / Destroyer Key – Up Close and Personal #20

We have already introduced Split Rock / Destroyer Key as in the first of the Seascapes.

Here we see it up close (and personal).

It is a unique geologically and ecologically to the many Mangrove Keys throughout the Florida Keys. It hosts hardwood and pine trees on an obviously rocky isle, along with an ever-present osprey couple who nest there. One of them is highlighted in the Birds Collection.

The reasoning behind the difference is interesting. Oral history tells of a Navy destroyer, caught in hurricane conditions and unable to get to safety. In effort to save the ship and crew, the ship was beached in the shallow flats making up the Mule Keys due west of Key West.

Following the storm, the Navy freed the beached ship by dredging a channel from the Atlantic (southern) side. Once it arrived at the ship the dredge then removed material from both sides of the ship, creating two piles of dredge ‘spoils’.

Over time rain washed out the salinity in the dredge spoils, and nature took over with vegetation and animal life assuming control of the dredge piles. The suggested history from dredging is easily verified by satellite imagery which clearly shows the dredged channel leading out to the Atlantic.

Comparing the green sea to the blues in the same island featured in ‘Islands in the Sky’, you get a sense of the dramatic changes in the subject matter across the keys occurring simply by the changes in lighting.