The Schaabe is a bar, almost twelve kilometres long, on the German Baltic Sea island of

Rügen Rügen (; Rani: ''Rȯjana'', ''Rāna''; , ) is Germany's largest island. It is located off the Pomeranian coast in the Baltic Sea and belongs to the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The "gateway" to Rügen island is the Hanseatic ci ...

. It joins the peninsulas of Jasmund and

Wittow Wittow is the northernmost peninsula of the island of Rügen. Wittow was a separate island until the High Middle Ages, but since then has been connected to the Jasmund peninsula of Rügen by the Schaabe spit. Wittow is most famous for Cape Ark ...

. Washed up and shaped by the sea, it forms a sickle-shaped shoreline on the bay of Tromper Wiek and separates the lagoons of the

Großer Jasmunder Bodden The Großer Jasmunder Bodden belongs to the Northern Rügener Boddens and is a water body on the southern edge of the Baltic Sea in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Description It is a ''bodden'', a type of lagoon that occurs in nort ...

and ''Breeger Bodden'' from the

Baltic Baltic may refer to: Peoples and languages *Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian *Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originatin ...

. The fine, washed up sand forms a giant natural bathing bay, that is bordered by the villages of Glowe and Juliusruh (a village in the municipality of

Breege Breege is a municipality in the Vorpommern-Rügen district, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the nort ...

). Unlike the second largest bar on the island of Rügen, the

Schmale Heide The Schmale Heide (literally "Narrow Heath") is a 9.5-kilometre-long and roughly 2-kilometre-wide bar between the Baltic seaside resort of Binz and the village of Neu Mukran near Sassnitz on the German island of Rügen. It lies in the municipalit ...

between Jasmund and the Granitz, which is dominated by the construction of the former Nazi "

Strength Through Joy NS Gemeinschaft ; KdF) was a German NSDAP-operated leisure organization in Nazi Germany. Richard Grunberger, ''The 12-Year Reich'', p. 197, It was part of the German Labour Front (), the national labour organization at that time. Set up in Nove ...

" resort of Prora and decades of military use and its associated infrastructure, the Schaabe between Glowe and Juliusruh is undeveloped apart from a managed forest, the only through road and its accompanying cycle path.

Formation

The Schaabe began to form about 4,500 years ago, when Rügen was still an island archipelago. Only the island cores, especially Wittow and Jasmund jutted out from the sea. As a result of the power of waves combined with a sustained uplift, the coasts of these island cores were gradually eroded and the

sediment Sediment is a solid material that is transported to a new location where it is deposited. It occurs naturally and, through the processes of weathering and erosion, is broken down and subsequently sediment transport, transported by the action of ...

, carried by ocean currents, was deposited to form spits. This process continues today. From archaeological finds it is known that the southern part of the Schaabe in the area of the present day Glowe first silted up at the time of the early Slavic settlements, that is in the 7th or 8th centuries. This also meant that sailors from the then major Slavic settlement near the present-day Ralswiek - at the transition between the Großer and

Kleiner Jasmunder Bodden The Kleiner Jasmunder Bodden belongs to the North Rügen Bodden and is a water body on the southern edge of the Baltic Sea in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Description It is a '' bodden'', a type of lagoon that occurs in northern ...

lagoons - had a much shorter access route to the open sea. Similar to the flint fields in the northern part of the Schmale Heide, but much smaller in size, are ridges of flint at many places in the northern part of Schaabe behind the main line of sand dunes, which were thrown up here by the waves in earlier times, when the sea level was higher. This proves that the erosion and transportation of flints from the chalk cliffs of Wittow and Jasmund has reduced over the centuries and been replaced by the deposition of fine beach sand.

Today

Behind the wide white beach a ten-kilometre-long and up to seven-metre-high coastal defence dune barrier protects the hinterland from storm floods. The dunes are stabilised by the painstaking planting of beach grass (''Ammophila arenaria''), which counteracts erosion by wind and waves and promotes height growth. Behind the main dunes is an area of low, hummocky dunes (one to five metres above NN), which were planted in 1866, 1881, 1901, 1952 and most recently in 1957 with pine (

European Black Pine ''Pinus nigra'', the Austrian pine or black pine, is a moderately variable species of pine, occurring across Southern Europe from the Iberian Peninsula and Lower Austria to the eastern Mediterranean, on the Anatolian peninsula of Turkey, Corsica ...

Birch A birch is a thin-leaved deciduous hardwood tree of the genus ''Betula'' (), in the family Betulaceae, which also includes alders, hazels, and hornbeams. It is closely related to the beech- oak family Fagaceae. The genus ''Betula'' contains 3 ...

Sessile oak ''Quercus petraea'', commonly known as the sessile oak, Welsh oak, Cornish oak, Irish oak or durmast oak, is a species of oak tree native to most of Europe and into Anatolia and Iran. The sessile oak is the national tree of Ireland, and an unof ...

and English oak.Generalplan Küsten- und Hochwasserschutz Mecklenburg-Vorpommern auf This coastal protection forest has an area of 168 hectares and extends southwest to the shore of the lagoon. Before it was afforested, the Schaabe had been known for centuries as the ''Schmale Wittower Heide'' ("Narrow Wittow Heath"). Due to the different soil moisture on the ''wiek'' (bay) and ''bodden'' (lagoon) sides of the Schaabe the vegetation is different on each side.

References

External links

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- Kite Aerial Photography - aerial photograph of the Schaabe {{Authority control Geography of Rügen Peninsulas of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Spits of the Baltic Sea