“That’s just 27 years from today,” Hallac said, pausing by a NOAA gauge near a marina in the Seashore. “We are basically talking about a low-lying sandbar,” said Young, “a highly dynamic complex of barrier islands.” The shoreline is always in motion, flushed by currents and waves, vulnerable to storms and hurricanes, and is longer, lower, and farther at sea (Hatteras Village is nearly 30 miles from the mainland) than most other barrier islands on the East and Gulf Coasts.Īccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the waters surrounding the Seashore have risen by about one foot in the last century, and are projected to lift by another 10 to 14 inches by 2050. It has little elevation in many places and has lost hundreds of feet in shoreline from erosion, threatening the only highway on and off of the islands. Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. The geology of the Seashore is unique, notes Robert S. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and by the Pamlico Sound, the second-largest estuary in the U.S. Beginning near the booming tourist resort of Nags Head in the north, the Seashore extends nearly 70 miles to the isolated village of Ocracoke in the south. America’s first federal seashore, authorized by Congress in 1937, it includes miles of perpetually shifting shoreline, scrubby, windblown interior sand flats, and vast salt marshes that serve as spawning grounds for fish and crabs, as well as providing habitat for migrating birds and waterfowl. No park may face a more daunting future than Cape Hatteras National Seashore. “All I know is that it will be different, maybe even very different.” “Will we still be here in 30, 40, or 50 years?” Hallac mused during a recent tour of Cape Hatteras. The accelerating impacts are also threatening the future of the seashores themselves. Department of Interior, including historic lighthouses, visitors’ centers, staff housing, parking lots, hiking trails, and marinas. Billions of dollars-worth of assets are at risk, according to a 2015 study by the U.S. In addition to their traditional roles as stewards of some of the last undeveloped shorelines in the United States, superintendents of the seashores now find themselves wrestling with the intensifying impacts of climate and weather changes. Meanwhile, along Gulf Islands National Seashore in Florida and Mississippi, rising water, more intense storms, and erosion are a constant threat, federal reports show. Sea level rise and shoreline shifts are also considered threats to wildlife at pristine Cumberland Island National Seashore in southern Georgia. At Cape Cod and Point Reyes, towering dunes and sea cliffs are eroding as a result of rising seas and thrashing surf. These days climate-related issues are creating an array of unanticipated challenges for the nation’s 10 national seashores, from Massachusetts to Northern California. We even had a kitchen sink wash up on the Seashore miles from where one house collapsed.” “There was wood, concrete, exposed septic tanks,” Hallac recalled. But a miles-long trail of trash - some of it dangerous - spewed along the Seashore’s nearby beaches. Contractors had hauled away debris from the private properties. Historically, the area has some of the highest rates of erosion on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, due in part to seas that have risen about one foot in the last century. In recent months, five houses had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean along a two-mile stretch of Rodanthe, one of eight resort villages embedded within the National Seashore. But this was no ordinary time for the superintendent of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which encompasses 67 miles of rolling sand dunes, pristine beaches, and sprawling salt marshes and is considered one of the jewels in the nation’s network of over 400 national parks, seashores, and other sites. On a recent spring morning, Dave Hallac probably should have been at his desk in the regional offices of the National Park Service in Manteo, North Carolina, reading mail and going over budgets.
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