Sue Sturgis reports in the Independent Weekly on the empirical (that’s reality-based) studies of East Carolina University geologist Stanley Riggs:
Humans are trying desperately to keep ahead of the rising waters. In 1999, the National Park Service moved Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a beloved state landmark, 1,000 yards away from the encroaching ocean. Three years ago, Mason Inlet at Wrightsville Beach near Wilmington was relocated 2,500 feet northward to keep a vacation resort from toppling into the sea. And state and local taxpayers spend millions of dollars each year on controversial beach restoration projects up and down the coast. An especially dramatic harbinger of what might lie ahead for North Carolina came in September 2003 when Hurricane Isabel, a relatively mild Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale of 1 to 5, carved a new inlet on Hatteras Island. Indeed, if sea level continues to rise at current rates and storm activity remains intense, the state’s barrier island chain will break up completely in a few decades, says coastal geologist Stanley Riggs of East Carolina University, who has spent the last 40 years studying the state’s shifting sands. By drilling holes up and down the coast, Riggs has come to understand what North Carolina’s beaches looked like 1,000 years ago, when sea level was rising at rates similar to what the computers are predicting for the coming century–and what’s in store for us in the not-so-distant future. Instead of a long strand of linked sand reefs, the Outer Banks will become small, isolated islands separated by bays. Hatteras Island will be completely under water except for parts of Buxton. Most of Ocracoke Island will be inundated, and there will be new inlets near Nags Head, Duck and Corolla. Pamlico Sound will turn into Pamlico Bay, and large swaths of mainland Dare and Hyde counties will disappear into the sea.
You’re looking at one generation,” Riggs says. “Your kids will see this collapse. If you’re not too old, you’ll see it yourself.”
To read more on the implications of global warming for North Carolina’s Outer Banks and inner coast, check out:
North Carolina Coastal Federation’s 2004 State of the Coast Report
The Potential Impacts of Global Warming on the Mid-Atlantic Region
This threat gives a new dimension to homeland security.
Impressive — and a dramatic example to think about.
One sentence in there, though, gives me pause. It says that the rates of land-loss are comparable to those experienced 1000 years ago. Human-caused global warming surely wasn’t an issue then. So some other factors can cause ocean levels to rise periodically (and, we can assume, to fall again as well).
Do we know what those other causes are? And have they been properly factored out of the current-day equation? It’s going to be hard going using this scientists’ data to argue that global warming is man-made, when part of the example says in bold letters “Sometimes this kinda thing just happens…”
- Tom