Rapid revegetation change following the glaciers' speedy retreat has enabled us to map and photograph the course of plant succession. Glaciers was published in 1840. Here, in the aftermath of retreating glaciers, Muir found a landscape not yet formed. At Glacier Bay you watch a vegetative wilderness being created and also see its culmination in coastal forest. A trip up bay mimics glacial retreat and rolls back plant succession, from the mature forest at Bartlett Cove to the naked Earth structure at the fjords' farthest reaches.
Biological succession produces profound change here in a mere decade.
Earnest, long-range studies of plant succession began in Glacier Bay in l916, with the work of Prof. William S. Cooper. His plant studies were continued in 1941 by Prof. Donald Lawrence and others. Moss will begin to add more conspicuous tufts. Next come horsetail and fireweed, dryas, alder, willows, then spruce, and finally hemlock forest. Where plants' seeds happen to land, of course, can be critical.