Rising waters threaten the coast of North Carolina

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Climate change is carving its name into the state's retreating shorelines. Planners are taking official notice as they prepare for a wetter world.

By Bruce Henderson

bhenderson@charlotteobserver.com

MANNS HARBOR The sea that sculpted North Carolina's coast, from its arc of barrier islands to the vast, nurturing sounds, is reshaping it once again.

Water is rising three times faster on the N.C. coast than it did a century ago as warming oceans expand and land ice melts, recent research has found. It's the beginning of what a N.C. science panel expects will be a 1-meter increase by 2100.

Rising sea level is the clearest signal of climate change in North Carolina. Few places in the United States stand to be more transformed.

About 2,000 square miles of our low, flat coast, an area nearly four times the size of Mecklenburg County, is 1 meter (about 39 inches) or less above water.

At risk are more than 30,500 homes and other buildings, including some of the state's most expensive real estate. Economists say $6.9 billion in property, in just the four counties they studied, will be at risk from rising seas by late this century.

Climate models predict intensifying storms that could add billions of dollars more in losses to tourism, farming and other businesses.

While polls show growing public skepticism of global warming, the people paid to worry about the future - engineers, planners, insurance companies - are already bracing for a wetter world.

"Sea-level rise is happening now. This is not a projection of something that will happen in the future if climate continues to change," said geologist Rob Young of Western Carolina University, who studies developed shorelines.

Nobody knows how high or fast the sea will rise. Water isn't likely to submerge all the state's low coastland because landowners will fight back. But the coast we know, with its fringe of salt marshes, its fluffy beaches and old harbor towns, might look like a different place a few generations from now.

That won't be the work of rising water alone, but of quirks in North Carolina's coastal topography. The flat ground means even a small increase in water level will spread far inland. The coastal plain is also sinking, the geologic legacy of the last Ice Age.

Sea-level rise magnifies two other powerful forces - erosion that gouges the coastline and the pounding of nor'easters and tropical storms.

Storms, Young said, are "the hammer" of rising seas. As storm surges pound ashore on a higher base of water, their damage multiplies.

The Outer Banks, some scientists predict, could disintegrate into a string of high spots - Avon, Buxton, Ocracoke - reachable only by boat.

If storms punch new inlets through the islands, the brackish sounds and wetlands that serve as vital nurseries for Atlantic coast seafood species would turn into open saltwater. Predatory fish would pour into previously protected waters. Marshes would migrate inland or drown.

Dead bald cypress trees already rim the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, graying in the encroaching salty water that engulfed and killed them. Much of the peninsula, which juts toward the northern Banks and is one the state's richest wildlife sanctuaries, could be underwater by century's end.

Human habitats will be forced into momentous decisions - fortify or flee.

Read more: http://www.charlotte...l#ixzz1BLLqqzTV

[wayno 9]

All doom and gloom. What they fail to state is that those islands (sandbars in reality) have been changing ever since first discovered. the inlets have not always been in the same location as now. Storms are a constant there as Hatteras sits 30 miles or so off the main land. There has always been roughly the same amont of water leaving the verried inlets so when a storm punches a new one through another one would eventually close. Almost happened to hatteras several years ago if I remamber correctly. Hatteras and Oregon inlets have terible reputations for boaters (though the best fishing in the East coast is located there) because they are constantly shoaling. Oregon especially is constantly being dredged to try to keep it open. They are sandbars so they are constantly moving and shifting.

There have been inlets on a couple other locations on hatteras island in the past so it wouldn't be the first time for those towns mentioned. In that area Ocracoke is the only inlet that has stayed constant in the past several hundred years.

All one has to do on any of these islands is look at the flooding during any northeaster and "proove" that the waters are rising when it is merely a normality as the winds will push waters farther up. The windward side gets flooded hard, the leeward side actually looses water. The waves pound and erode the dunes. the wind lets up and the backside of the storm comes around and the wind shifts. Now all that sound water wants to come rushing out and it will find the least resistance. Could be that the inlet was shoaled over to much and the water finds a narrow spot in the island with the dunes eroded down and------WOOOOOOSH------possible new inlet. It happens. It has happened. The other thing is when the wind blows sand from the coastal side it has to deposit it somewhere. Right? The islands have constantly been shifting westward as well. The original location of the hatteras light (about a mile from the sea) comes to mind. Had to move it in the 90's because it was about to get washed away.

And as for the poor little fishy's geting eaten by the preditors that will start ariving through any new inlet, LOL. actually ROTFLOL!!! I guess the red and black drum, trout, rockfish, bluefish, tarpon, sharks, etc... that make the sound home aren't really there yet!

[wayno 9]

Forgot to point out that Ocracoke has always only been accessable by boat. There are no bridges there.