Rising sea levels may be causing 70 percent of the centuries-old cedar trees in Paget Marsh to die, Government Conservation Officer Jeremy Madeiros said last week.

According to records kept at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR), sea levels around Bermuda have risen almost nine inches since 1926, and the rate at which the water is rising is increasing every year.

Last year that fact, combined with the effects of a gyre, meant sea levels in the Bermuda area were the highest they had been in at least 300 years.

A gyre, explained Mr. Madeiros, is a "great big whirlpool of warm water" that appears every 20 years or so in the waters off Bermuda. As the water is so warm it expands, raising sea levels.

However, he said: "We have had gyres before ... those cedars (in Paget Marsh) have survived all the previous gyres for the past 200 or 300 years."

But last year, he said, the gyre combined with the slow rise in sea levels meant that for the first time in at least the 300-year lives of the cedars in Paget Marsh the sea level was higher than the level of dryer soil in which the cedars have their roots.

"(The water) was raised enough so that all the roots were totally underwater from April or May till August or September."

And the water was not fresh, he added, but salt water bubbling in from Hamilton Harbour.

Unlike mangrove trees, cedar trees cannot survive for long with their roots inundated in salt water.

"They got salt poisoning," said Mr. Madeiros.

The palmetto trees in the marsh seem to have survived the flooding, however around November last year people started to notice some of the big, old cedars were turning first yellow, then brown.

"People were calling in, concerned," said Mr. Madeiros.

Paget Marsh, he said, is an environmentally important area to Bermuda as "it is the only place where a fragment of the original primeval forest survived".

According to a sea level According to a sea level study being conducted by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI), Bermuda once comprised an area of about 250 square miles of land, before global temperatures rose and oceans followed suit. In fact, it was just last summer that BUEI announced the discovery during the study of the remains of a cedar forest to the south-east of Bermuda. The forest, dated at about 7,290 years old, was 30 feet underwater.

Now it looks as though the last remnants of that original forest, until now safe in Paget Marsh, is also disappearing beneath the waves.

The cedars in Paget Marsh have survived for so long, said Mr. Madeiros, for several reasons: the marsh escaped being made into a dump or building site, and the strain of cedars there seemed to have a much higher resistance to the scale insect disease which wiped out between 95 and 98 percent of Bermuda's cedars between 1948 and 1953.

"About 50 percent of the cedars in Paget Marsh survived," he said, "some well over 200 years old. They are massive big things, mixed with palmettos - almost like a museum of Bermuda, they are very important educationally.

"They have survived there with no problem for hundreds of years."

Mr. Madeiros was not just concerned about the loss of the cedars, but the loss of low-lying land due to rising sea levels. Already there is evidence of plants dying in low-lying areas in Devonshire Marsh near Vesey Street, on Jubilee Road, and at Shelly Bay.

And, he predicted, within a few decades all low-lying areas in Bermuda will be in danger. "Everybody seems to be confirming this," he said.

Concerned about problems with people attempting to steal the dying cedars from Paget Marsh, Mr. Madeiros added: "Not all the cedars died - and even the dead ones will stand and exist there for centuries."

The cedars are just as important dead as alive, he said, explaining that the roots of the trees are all interlocked.

"It's like taking holes out of a rug, the whole thing unravels ... if we remove any, in another hurricane the whole area will collapse.

"Even dead they will perform an important function for centuries."