New England stone walls are a man-made wonder deserving their own branch of science

Instagram photo via The Conversation

Walls of rock with novel plant and animal life wind through New England, and it's time to give them their own place in science, writes Robert M. Thorson for The Conversation, a journalism platform for academics."The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere – a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges separating a patchwork of otherwise moist soils. Stone walls can be found here and there in other states, but only in New England are they nearly ubiquitous. That's due to a regionally unique combination of hard crystalline bedrock, glacial soils and farms with patchworks of small land parcels."

European settlers working with draft horses built nearly all of the walls. "The mass of stone that farmers moved in that century staggers the mind – an estimated 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) of barricades, most stacked thigh-high and similarly wide," Thorson notes. "That's long enough to wrap our planet 10 times at the equator, or to reach the Moon on its closest approach to Earth."

"Natural scientists have been working to quantify this phenomenon, which is larger in volume than the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall in Britain and the Egyptian pyramids at Giza combined," Thorson writes. "This work began in 1870 and generated the U.S. government's 1872 Census of Fences. Today, scientists are using a technique called LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, to measure and map stone walls across New England.

A stoat scurries along a rock wall in search of mice.
(Instagram photo via The Conversation)

"These archaeological artifacts are so ubiquitous that they have become a geological landform that in turn creates a novel ecological habitat," Thorson adds. "But despite their importance, never have the stone walls of New England been technically defined, classified and given a common terminology in a peer-reviewed journal. They fell, it seems, through disciplinary cracks."

The region's rock walls are in "some ways analogous to the region's wetlands, which also are landforms that farmers created or significantly modified as they settled the land in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, since the 1990s, wetlands have earned a robust science, a solid legal framework and excellent management protocols," Thorson writes. "In my view, the time has come to do the same for New England's stone walls."

To read how Thorson and his students and colleagues are working to develop a formal interdisciplinary science of stone walls, click here.