Carolina Environmental Diversity Explorations
Evidence of rising sea level · By Dirk Frankenberg
A low-lying peninsula
Figure 5. This flat land is quickly flooded when sea level rises. (Photograph by the author. More about the photograph)
We now take a virtual leap from a barrier island to the far end of Carteret County’s Down East peninsula. This peninsula separates Bogue Sound from the Neuse River estuary, but does so with a flat and low-lying land. This characteristic of the land was noticed early by Native Americans who established canoe drags across it in at least two places. It was also noticed by European settlers who converted one of the canoe drags into a canal and later built the wider and deeper Intracoastal Waterway across it. A sense of the scale of these projects can be gained from Figure 5, which shows the flat, low-lying land that forms the peninsula. It takes much less digging to make a canal through land like this than it would in a land of hills and high elevations.
It is also clear from Figure 5 why the impact of rising sea level here can be very dramatic. A small increase in the level of the sea floods large areas of this flat landscape. This process has been going on for some time, as will be apparent from subsequent stops on this tour.
