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Cumberland Island is the largest and southernmost of Georgia's Golden Isles, and one of the most varied barrier islands on the Atlantic coast. Geologically it is young — about 40,000 years old — a core of Ice Age sand wrapped in beaches, dunes and marsh laid down since.
The historic Main Road, Cumberland Island National Seashore.
The island
| Where | 2–5 km (1–3 mi) off the coast of Camden County, Georgia |
| National seashore since | October 23, 1972 |
| Size | about 36,347 acres (14,709 hectares) |
| Wilderness | about 8,840 acres — the most of any barrier island on the U.S. east coast |
| Biosphere reserve | part of the Carolinian–South Atlantic Biosphere Reserve since 1986 |
| Habitats | beach, dunes, salt marsh, mudflats, tidal creeks, upland forest and freshwater lakes |
How it formed
The Atlantic Coastal Plain here is a staircase of old marine terraces, each lower and younger as it nears the ocean — shorelines left behind as sea level rose and fell.
| Part of the island | What it is made of | Age |
|---|---|---|
| The core (east) | Silver Bluff barrier-island sand | Pleistocene, about 40,000 years |
| Around it | beaches, dunes, sand spits and wetlands — a shoreline complex | Holocene, the last ~11,700 years |
| The west side | intertidal estuary deposits of the Cumberland and Brickhill Rivers | Holocene |
The island took shape as global sea level swung during the last Ice Age, and it is still being reshaped by waves, wind and tides.
4,000 years of people
The island's archaeology spans Native American cultures, Spanish missions, colonial forts, plantations and the enslaved Africans who worked them, military occupation, African American communities, seafaring, and the grand estates of the Gilded Age. Two archaeological districts are on the National Register of Historic Places: Table Point, with artifacts of Native American communities, and Rayfield, of an enslaved African community.
Maps and reports
The NPS Geologic Resources Inventory has a scoping summary, a digital geologic map, a report and a poster for the seashore, and a Soil Resources Inventory is complete. Both are in the NPS DataStore — saved searches 2799 (geology) and 2835 (soils). The park's own nature and science pages go further.
Sources
Written from "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia," Geologic Resources Division, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites Griffin (1982) and the National Park Service (2014, 2016).
In these collectionsCumberland Island National Seashore
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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