Carolina Environmental Diversity Explorations
Large sand volume barrier islands · By Dirk Frankenberg
What do the old shoreline sand supplies look like?
Figure 1. The ridge in the distance is actually an ancient shoreline. (Photograph by the author. More about the photograph)
North Carolina’s old shorelines look like long sandy ridges. On the peninsula that separates Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, the north-south highways and railways were built on these ridges. If you look at a state map, you will find N.C. Highway 32, an unnumbered road, and a railroad running parallel to one another from Pinetown to Plymouth. All three were built on an old shoreline. The same old shoreline extends south through Aurora and Minnesott Beach (N.C. Highway 306 is built on it for most of this distance) and toward Swansboro. In Swansboro, the old shoreline appears a bluff on the west side of the river.
Figure 1 shows the sandy ridge of the old shoreline as it appears in Swansboro. Note that the three live oaks in the left background are growing on the crest of a slope that drops more than 20 feet to the waters of the White Oak River. The same steep embankment can be seen further in the background to the right of the house. This old shoreline stranded as sea level retreated from its last high stand about 120,000 years ago.
When I take students to Swansboro on actual fieldtrips there are always some that seem not to believe that the modest ridge shown in Figure 1 is really an old shoreline. I suspect that some readers share that skepticism, so on the next page I will do what I do on regular field trips, and take you to a place where the vertical extent of the ridge can be seen.
