- [country music playing] - [Walt] Coming up on Mississippi Roads, we explore Mississippi's Red Bluff.

We visit the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and talk with geologist James Starnes about the ancient glacier rocks from the Mississippi River.

All that coming up now on Mississippi Roads.

♪ Down Mississippi Roads.... ♪ ♪ Mississippi Roads.

♪ Welcome to Mississippi Roads, I'm Walt Grayson.

As you can tell this week, we're not on the road.

We're on a river --the Pearl River, to be exact.

The reason for that, though, is this episode, we're going to take a look at the effect that our waterways and our streams have had on Mississippi.

Take the Pearl, for instance.

It runs 444 miles through central Mississippi and Louisiana, down to the Gulf of Mexico.

It has remolded the landscape and actually, to a great degree, shaped history in the area through which it travels.

It's amazing what our rivers and streams leave behind.

Now in our first story, we're going to stop at one of the most fantastic geological formations we have in the state of Mississippi and to a great degree, we owe thanks to the Pearl River for helping create this grand scene.

[expansive music] - Red Bluff really speaks for itself.

This is considered, you know, one of the unknown beauties of Mississippi, and every time I share a photo of it, I always get, "I never knew we had that in Mississippi."

"I never knew we had something like that going."

And a part of coming out here is it's your own little secret.

- I've been coming here since I was a little girl, and it's kind of like an escape from the city.

I can just look over the edge and just be in awe because I can't see that really anywhere else.

I mean, except for the Grand Canyon.

But, you know, I have to go there to find that.

- The first time I went to Red Bluffs, I was a student at Southern Miss, and it's breathtaking.

It's called Mississippi's Mini Grand Canyon for a reason.

You walk up at the top of it looking down over and you see pine trees as far as the eye can see.

And the colors are breathtaking.

You get reds, yellows, purples all over the place.

It's a beautiful, breathtaking scenery and there's really nothing like it in the state, and I can say that from experience that Red Bluff is unique.

[stream burbling] Red Bluff formed from erosion continuously over the course of 1000 years.

It's an erosional escarpment, and there are two main sources of erosion going on at Red Bluff.

The first is rainwater falling down the sides.

That causes local erosion that caused the Department of Transportation to have to move Highway 587 a few times.

They've moved it about 30 feet away now, and eventually they're going to have to move it again.

It's similar to the Grand Canyon in that the Grand Canyon is a sandstone.

The Grand Canyon, the sandstone that it cuts through is much more expansive than the terrace deposit that we have here in Mississippi.

But the Pearl River cuts through the sands of the terrace deposit that we have here, similarly to the way the Colorado River cuts through the Grand Canyon.

Red Bluff sits at about 370 feet in elevation, that's the top of the terrace.

You've got about 100 foot drop 30 meters down to the base where the spring comes in contact with the Hattiesburg Formation.

And you've got another 100 feet of gradual erosion from the base of Red Bluff, all the way to the Pearl River, to the east.

But it's a beautiful mosaic looking back into the past.

The colors of Red Bluff paint the story of the old river channel.

The trunk stream that formed Red Bluff has since eroded away, and the only clues we have to how it behaved are left at Red Bluff.

So you see the sands and the gravel and the colors and the paleo channels, which are old drainages that would have flowed into this trunk stream are all still preserved in the site of Red Bluff and can be studied by geologists.

There are fossils at Red Bluff, too, in the gravels, the fossils are much older than both the terrace and the Miocene subcropping.

The fossils that you find at Red Bluff are around 270 million years old and in a time period called the Paleozoic.

These gravel fossils range from crinoids to brachiopods.

And they're not big fossils.

They're tiny, they're chert fossils, which means they formed in a limestone.

A long time ago, the limestone eroded away and the gravel chert flowed down a river and was deposited in the terrace, the same terrace that left Red Bluff.

You also have sedimentary structures, is what we call them, and its crawlspace, which are formations in the sand that you'll see in the sides that look like waves, and those are formed from flow structures.

So when the water was moving that sand around, it was almost frozen in time and we can still see it today, from 2 million years ago.

- I think just looking at the Red Bluff over time and see how much has caved in really makes you reflect on the past.

I think it's a beautiful landmark.

It's gorgeous because it's nature and this red dirt makes it so distinct and you can see each layer of rocks and sand that's been weathered down.

And if you go actually into the Red Bluff, you can see the rocks on the sand and how it's been weathered by the rain and wind and people.

A couple of years ago, my sister and I were like, "Wow, this place is really dirty and a lot of people just dump their trash here."

So we come here with trash bags and gloves to pick up the trash around the area.

- I just really wanted to preserve the natural beauty of the landscape and, as you can see over the years, it's definitely deteriorated because of the amount of people that will come in and just maybe spend the night, take a day of camping or hiking and then just leave their trash here.

We find a lot of beer bottles.

I've seen diapers, shoes, mainly just a lot of alcohol products.

I've seen crazy stuff such as there's been a washing machine.

At one point in time, there has been multiple tires.

There's been all kinds of crazy stuff that people just dump just because they have nowhere else to put it.

And it's very disheartening to think that people don't appreciate the land as much as I do.

And I just kind of wanted to come in and, I don't know, show people that there is something to appreciate it for.

There's only so much we can take out, but you know, every little bit counts.

And I just I really think it's important that not only are we helping out in the land factor, but also in the ocean factor in terms of cleaning up the Earth.

- I've been to Red Bluff on field trips with the geology department at the University of Southern Mississippi, and I've also been just for fun.

Everybody likes going to it.

It's a nice trip to take on the weekend because you can get out there and you can see this awesome geologic feature right in your backyard.

If you're going to Red Bluff, things you're going to need to take.

You're definitely gonna need a good camera.

And you definitely need a bottle of water because it's a long hike out.

- There's always an adventure to happen.

Every time I've come out here and I've been coming out here for a long time now and there's always something new.

There's always something it gives you there's always something more.

Just like being under the stars at night, you really get a sense of how small you can be and how nature can be, and just a sense of something greater.

And I think just coming out here, you have a sense of something greater than yourself.

I started photography about two years ago, mainly just coming out here, seeing the beauty of it and just being challenged to try to capture Red Bluff on photos and from that just a love of photography since then.

But you really don't get the grand scale until you're here, The pictures really don't do it justice of being out here and seeing it for yourself.

And I think that's a lot of Mississippi.

You just have to be there and see it for yourself.

- The Pearl River ranks fourth of all the rivers that empty into the Gulf of Mexico in freshwater discharge.

Matter of fact, the estuaries there at the mouth of the Pearl River are very much affected by this fresh water that comes out of the Pearl and empties into the Mississippi Sound.

And in our next story, that's where we're going: to the estuaries on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

We're going to the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and find out a little bit about what they do.

(upbeat music) - This is the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

This is a program that the Department of Marine Resources in Mississippi works on with NOAA, the Office of Coastal Management of NOAA.

Most of our projects are aimed at assisting our state in having better coastal management.

If we better understand how these habitats, these estuaries, how they function, what affects them, then we better know how to work with them.

So we better know how to develop around them and still let them be the productive habitats they are.

- We go year after year and we visit the same sites and we measure the same things.

And I think that's one unique thing about the estuarine research reserve system is that we can look at long-term change and some of these metrics, whereas a lot of research projects are shorter in duration.

We're looking at change over decades.

We have four permanent water quality stations that monitor water quality 24-7.

Then we also have weather stations on the reserve that monitor several different weather quality parameters 24-7.

We visit five different sites that are located along an elevation gradient.

They extend from an upland habitat, more of a freshwater marsh system all the way down to a low marsh and estuary.

And at each of those, we visit them twice a year now and we measure elevation change and we measure vegetation community.

- We've got seven vehicles and five boats.

And as we all know, boats take a little attention every now and then.

We just try to do preventive maintenance and keep the oil changed, and keep the vehicles in, you know, top notch condition because they're in kind of a harsh environment out here.

We might have three out at one time in different directions with different staff on it doing research and that sort of thing.

So there's just about a constant use for the vehicles and the boats.

We do have a 38-foot boat custom built for carrying large groups out throughout the estuary.

We transport classes out on it, other researchers.

It's almost like one of the old landing craft boats.

The bow goes down.

You can haul equipment out to different places, depending on what your mission is that day.

I grew up out here in this area and as a kid, we were always out here fishing, crabbing, shrimping.

So it is special to me.

I like being a small part of this mission to protect it and make it better and show it to other people.

- There was a lot of different sites they looked at, but one of the places that they ended up focusing on was a place where there was an existing U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife refuge, which is where we are now: the Grand Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

There was a huge connection to that area because a lot of the local folks that were interested in it, they grew up here.

There was a little community here and they wanted to preserve the natural habitat in this area.

- I was born down there, July 1, 1932.

And I try to be a good ambassador for that area, especially to fish and wildlife, because that was one of the things we were raised on.

We ate many a fish during The Depression and since The Depression.

We were born and raised right there and you want to preserve it.

You see it getting destroyed, so you want to protect it.

- This estuary is really productive as a nursery for fish, so all kinds of commercial seafood and then also the prey of that commercial seafood grows up in an estuary.

The edges are known to be really productive for all kinds of animals and plants.

- The grasses that we have out there, the oysters feed on it, the shrimp feed on it, and the little minnows, you know, the speckled trout and red fish love the little minnows.

The waters of Bayou Heron is one of the best places to fish in the country.

- On the upland side of the reserves, there are wet pine savanna habitats and wet pine savannas are open grasslands.

These grasslands are some of the most diverse habitats on Earth.

There's an incredibly high plant diversity in these grasslands.

This is one of the last remaining intact and managed by prescribed fires areas, so that we can maintain that diversity, so that people can come out and see this just incredible diversity of plants and flowers, insects and birds.

- It's kind of rare that you have an upland area that transitions all the way into an estuary and marsh without any kind of development.

I think it makes an excellent place for us to understand these long-term changes because we have the ability to watch marshes migrate upland as sea level rises.

In a lot of places along the Gulf Coast, there is a barrier of development that prevents marshes from migrating upland.

So it's kind of a perfect area to understand those changes.

- A lot of our aim is so that our community has a sense of place and can be connected with the natural habitat in their area.

There's a trail behind the building, a little boardwalk that goes out to the freshwater marsh.

And then there's a beaten trail through the savanna, so you can look at the wet pine savanna in the front, and then there's a smaller trail about a mile loop that goes through an oak grove called the Oak Grove Birding Trail.

And then most of the near is in the marshes.

If you have a boat, it's easy to access it.

There's a boat launch at the end of Bayou Heron Road and we do have a blue way.

So if you're really an avid kayaker, we have a great blue way trail for you to explore.

So we have a small interpretive center.

It gives some interpretation of the wet pine savannas and the marshland habitats and a lot of the plants, animals that you would find there.

We have a live exhibit.

Toby is our terrapin and she lives in a big tank and she goes to festivals sometimes too.

So we take her out so that kids can take a closer look or touch her.

We'll go into the classroom, we'll do some classroom lessons and then we'll take those kids after their classroom lesson and bring them out here.

It's called our On the Road program.

That’s a really successful program.

We have schools from all across Mississippi that participate.

- We want people to understand the work that we're doing.

One of our major goals is for them to appreciate this area and to maybe, you know, want to conserve other areas like we conserve resources at Grand Bay.

- Wild places are good for people.

Being able to come to a wild place and see something that is like your grandparents might have seen it or your great-grandparents might have seen it, or just to listen to the birds and the animals and the wind and all of that.

It's just good for people's souls.

And so a lot of my interest in restoration of wild habitat is for the animals and the plants and the fish.

But it's for people.

- It's preserved now, and my grandkids can fish down here when they come from Colorado or Texas.

Your kids can come from the Delta and go fishing down there.

That's important stuff.

- You ever been driving down a gravel road and wonder where all the rocks came from?

Well, by and large they came from ancient riverbeds.

You can look through those rocks sometimes and find maybe little tiny fossils in there.

But some of the deposits in some of the gravel pits left behind by specifically the Mississippi River are way bigger than little tiny fossils.

You know, the old Ancient Mississippi used to meander all over the countryside as it cut its way toward the sea.

And it not only left behind deep gravel deposits, but also objects so big that geologists were amazed when they first saw them.

And then they were really amazed when they discovered how they got here.

I'm driving on the bottom of the Mississippi River.

Obviously not the river we have today, but the river as it was and where it was about 700,000 years ago.

Now today this is a gravel pit in the bluffs along the Warren/Hinds County line.

- The river is now about 15 miles west of here and about 200 feet lower, so the river has cut down and moved west over time.

- [Walt] James Starnes is a geologist with the Department of Environmental Quality and has been studying this exposed riverbed in west Mississippi for a while now, looking at each rock individually, sometimes listening to its story.

- We let the rocks tell their own story and they they seem to do it really, really clearly.

And I mean, if you just pick one up and kind of listen to it, it will give you some clues about what its history was.

And together, collectively, they make a larger story as well.

- [Walt] Well, these rocks tell a bunch of stories, but one of those stories at first might seem like fiction for Mississippi.

- Most people don't consider Mississippi to be a glaciated region, but the ancestral Mississippi River and the modern Mississippi River drained what was glacial territory up in the Mid-Continent.

As a mile-thick sheet of ice periodically covered much of North America, it drained at the Gulf of Mexico right through here.

But the glaciers never came down this far.

The farthest south they made it was actually in southern Missouri.

So that's about as far, you know.

But then our climate was very, very different here at the time.

It was certainly much colder.

But we did not have the glaciers this far south.

But we just had icebergs and things that chipped off of glaciers.

But we also had major ice dam breaks where you had lots of water in the summer times backing up behind an ice front.

And when they gave way, it sent a flood of water down through here, as well as lots and lots of ice.

- [Walt] When those prehistoric ice dams broke with that sudden rush of water and icebergs, lots of hitchhikers came along with it here to Mississippi, and a few of them had the telltale sign that they'd been carried at some point on their journey by glaciers.

- We know that because studying the rocks, we find things like glacially-faceted stones.

These are stones that were drug along the base of the ice, and they have a nice little flat surfaces with scratches on them that only can come from ice.

- [Walt] Now you'd think there's nothing new with rocks, but James and his crew realized something.

They found petrified wood here that has been glacially-faceted.

Now that changes the whole understanding of petrified wood in these prehistoric river rock deposits.

If the petrified wood was carved by the glaciers, that means it became stone elsewhere and not in these rock beds, and therefore the petrified wood has to be much older than was typically considered.

- It was always assumed that the petrified wood was the same age as the gravel deposits here.

One of our geologists that works with us, Jonathan Laird, he ended up finding a piece of petrified wood that was glacially-faceted, just like some of the other rocks we have.

So that thing had to have been petrified long before it was carried within that glacier.

So that was kind of new to us.

Now all of this is pretty much new to us.

The whole idea of the glaciation and these glacially-faceted stones, these boulders in here.

Their story is actually a new story we're telling.

- [Walt] Now to me, new stories from old rocks is fascinating.

Now for instance, the fact that petrified wood is older than we thought it was and that boulders came to Mississippi hitchhiking on icebergs from ice ages thousands and thousands of years ago.

- But these were actually carried in ice down the ancestral Mississippi River from one of these floods.

This is not as big as they get, now.

But once we have... this is going to the Natural Science Museum.

These are going to be on loan for a Glacier Interpretation.

- [Walt] No telling how many boulders like this are buried under the soils of Mississippi.

But if you want to see some of what the Ice Age brought to us, all you have to do is stroll out on the lawn in front of the Natural Science Museum in Jackson.

- These things were carried in a glacial flood, just a flood of unimaginable proportions where you’ve got water backed up behind ice.

Say like an earthquake or something on the New Madrid hit and all that water come down with it with huge, huge chunks of ice.

But they tell a story.

They tell a really, really important story.

It tells about where the glaciers were, where they traveled through, the rock that they were chewing through to get here.

And not only that, it tells the story about the ancestral Mississippi River at this time.

- [Walt] Well, if you know what you're looking for and you know how to read the rocks, the stones can be decoded and they can tell their stories almost out loud.

Stories of being ancient bedrock and then being broken by the weight of a mile-thick sheet of glacial ice.

Then when that ice broke loose and then melted, it carried these rocks here.

But that's not the end of their stories.

- When this stuff gets put on roads and gravel driveways and playgrounds at schools, I know of kids that spend all their time on the playground picking up rocks and fossils with their friends.

And so it's a wonderful pastime for Mississippians.

- Well, that's about all the time we have for this show.

But if you'd like information about anything you've seen, contact us at: And check out our Mississippi Public Broadcasting Facebook Page while you're at it.

And take a look at our Mississippi Roads Facebook Page, too.

Till next time, I'm Walt Grayson.

I’ll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads.