Florida (Compass American Guides)

Natural Features

It just dangles out there, unprotected, open to the whims of the sea. Nothing solid to bound it, bind it, hold it in place. Shorelines shift with the movement of tides and winds. A hurricane creates entirely new islands in a flash of its eye. The peninsula we today call Florida has continually narrowed and widened her shorelines during the last 20 million years. She rose from the sea, then plunged beneath again as Ice Age glaciers first grew and then melted. She has kept her thumbs-down shape -- more or less -- only for the past 30,000 years, making hers some of the youngest land on the planet. The Floridian plateau, as geologists refer to this broad shelf that protrudes southeastward from the continent, has a limestone base, layered with sand, silt, shells, and bones.


For the most part, Florida is a low-lying plain with an average elevation of less than 100 feet above sea level. The state's highest elevation is a mere 345 feet. Even so, this relentlessly flat piece of land supports varied landscapes, most notably brackish estuaries, sand dunes, and ridged hardwood hammocks. No geographical point in Florida is more than 60 miles from the sea.


Wetlands

Though scattered throughout the state, Florida's wetlands are best seen where they dominate -- in the southern third of its peninsula, where a 150-mile-long and 50-mile-wide sheet of moving water stretches from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. These swampy regions, which the first settlers were determined to make farmable and habitable, are now being recognized for their enormous ecological importance. Efforts have been launched to preserve the region as a natural resource, and to stop the drainage and canal building that were an integral part of that early effort. Wetlands once covered 60 percent of the state; today, they occupy 15 to 20 percent. Within the wetlands are a variety of habitats -- mangrove forests, salt and freshwater marshes, and cypress lowlands. Living within each is a diverse wildlife population that includes alligators, manatees, indigo snakes, and a fabulous birdlife -- from the rare wood stork to ospreys, egrets, and herons.


Beaches

The state's 1,350 miles of coastline are cloaked in about 1,000 miles of sand. On Florida's west coast (most notably the Panhandle) are seemingly endless stretches of soft, brilliant white sand. The light color is caused by high concentrations of pure quartz, scrubbed nearly white by water and wind. On Atlantic Coast beaches, sand is coarser and gold- or coral-colored. Along both coasts the native plants -- palm trees, sea oats, sea grape trees, to name but a few -- flourish thanks to their ability to withstand salt, sand-blasting, and hurricanes.


The width of Florida beaches varies wildly from year to year. Up to 28 feet of sand may disappear due to erosion, and while the sea gives back as much as 16 feet, the state's beaches still are eroding at an average of three feet a year.


The barrier islands strung along both coasts are created when drifting sandy material piles up against underwater rises, usually of limestone or coquina rock. During hurricanes or over many years, waves continually deposit sand.


Rivers, Springs, and Caves

The highly porous limestone that supports Florida's surface has been gnawed away over millions of years by fluctuating sea levels and the carbonic acid from decaying vegetation. The result of this erosion is a vast subterranean maze of rivers and caverns. When the roofs of underground caverns collapse they form sinkholes, wide depressions in the earth. Sinkholes are so common in Florida -- there are currently about 150 sizeable ones -- that they've become a popular tourist attraction. Hundreds of Florida's underwater caves have been made accessible by the advent of scuba diving. The largest above-ground cave system is the Florida Caverns, west of Tallahassee in the Panhandle.


Florida's 320 natural springs -- among the most spectacular of the natural features in the state -- release crystal-clear water that remains at a constant temperature through all seasons. The springs pump to the surface minerals that enrich the soil and create a pastoral paradise of green fields, wildflowers, and forest.


Forest and Hammocks

Jungle and forest once covered most of Florida, where 50 percent of the tree species found in the United States grow naturally. Here, jungles are more commonly called by the Indian word, hammock, and refer to the rounded islands of hardwood trees that rise above wetlands. Live oak and cabbage palm (the state tree), gumbo-limbo, pigeon plum, soldierwood, crabwood, and white stopper are the most common trees found on hammocks. Gulf Hammock, in Levy County, is the largest sweep of hammock land in the state. In the dryer, forested tracts of the northwest, pine trees flourish.


Lakes

Florida counts 7,712 named lakes of 11 acres or more, many of them formed by sinkholes. More than 2,000 miles of river waters run through the state. One of the state's most distinguishing features is Lake Okeechobee, the nation's second largest freshwater lake that is contained in any one state -- 448,000 acres in size. The majority of Florida's lakes are found in the rolling hills of the central highlands.


Florida's Critters

Before seas rose at the end of the Pleistocene's last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, radically changing the climate and flooding much of the land, creatures such as the rhinoceros, llama, giant armadillo, tapir, camel, pygmy horse, saber-toothed tiger, mastodon, and great woolly mammoth wandered the Florida peninsula. Survivors from earlier times live in the water: horseshoe crabs (Jurassic Period, 190 million years ago), alligators, manatees, armadillos, and loggerhead sea turtles.


These animals are among Florida's treasures, along with its panthers, Key deer, wood storks, bald eagles, gopher tortoises, crocodiles, indigo snakes, and five varieties of sea turtles. Due to habitat destruction, nearly 40 species of Florida animals and plants can be found on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's list of endangered and threatened animals.