Campeche / Galveston Island

Galveston Island is a sandy 30-mile-long barrier island on the Texas coast, one of several that help protect the mainland from the sea, with the Yucatan peninsular area of Mexico lying across 650 miles of open water in the Gulf of Mexico. About 18,000 years ago, at the peak of the last great Ice Age, water was trapped as ice, sea levels were lower, and this shoreline extended 70 miles farther out. Over shorter spans of time, tides, currents, waves, and especially storms can dramatically alter the shoreline. A seawall was built to protect human life and property from storm-driven waves, but the beach remains vulnerable, and sand is periodically brought in to replace what erosion removes. The waters, beach, tidal edge, and nearby land support a great variety of life, from tiny animals at the base of the food chain to fish, dolphins, clams, worms, birds, and humans through the seafood industry. Galveston was named for Bernardo de Galvez, a Spanish colonial governor and general, but in the early 1800s pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte once called it Campeche. Brown pelicans, once threatened with extinction in the early 1960s because DDT caused defective eggshells and premature egg breakage, recovered after DDT was banned in 1972 and the species was listed as endangered in 1973. A Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, the rarest and most endangered sea turtle, came ashore near the Seawall on 28 April 2006 to lay 116 eggs; the eggs were incubated in a laboratory to protect them from predators, and 89 hatchlings later emerged and were released at Padre Island National Seashore. Bottlenose dolphins, large-brained and social marine mammals, are regularly seen near the shore and in Galveston harbor and bay.

Galveston, Texas · United States