Barrier Islands

Wednesday, April 4 - Driving!! Traveled through West Virginia and Virginia to reach Mt. Airy, NC, just across the border into North Carolina.

Thursday, April 5 - Traveled southeast across NC to the coast, crossing Paleozoic metamorphic rocks on the Piedmont and Carolina Slate Belts, Mesozoic sedimentary rocks of the Triassic Rift Basins, and Tertiary sedimentary rocks of the Coastal Plain. Planned stops included Flanner Beach on the Nuese River estuary, where Pleistocene sedimentary rocks are exposed in shoreline bluffs.

Friday, April 6 - The day was spent exploring Bogue Banks, one of the largest, consistently highest (with a maximum elevation of 35 ft!), and most developed barrier islands on the NC coast. The focus was on the processes that form and modify these barrier islands, and the interaction between human development and the natural shoreline processes. There are a number of towns on Bogue Bank, each with a different development philosophy. There are examples of both careful and not-so-careful development, in low-to extremely high-risk settings.

Saturday, April 7 - The group  traversed the spectacular Cape Hatteras National Seashore, beginning with a ferry ride from Cedar Island to Ocracoke, and proceeding northeast up Ocracoke Island, across Hatteras Inlet on another ferry, and continuing to Cape Hatteras. A stop was made at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, constructed in 1870 and recently moved back from the shore after 1500 feet of shoreline retreat brought the ocean to the edge of the lighthouse foundation. If you do the math, this is an average rate of retreat of 11.5 feet per year! Other planned stops included Oregon Inlet, where southward migration of the inlet is threatening the highway bridge, and Jockey Ridge, an immense sand dune near Kitty Hawk.