Battling the Sea on the Outer Banks

"Even without climate change, the Outer Banks-a nearly two-hundred-mile stretch of barrier islands between the mainland and the Atlantic, running from just north of Roanoke Island, where the British first settled in 1585, down the North Carolina coast-are precarious. The islands want to move, as waves and wind push sand from the ocean edge to the leeward or sound side. You could see the whole process explained on this National Park Service sign if it weren't half covered with sand by the very processes it describes."

"And now, as the sea level creeps inexorably upward and warmer oceans brew stronger storms, the dynamic intensifies. It's one of the planet's many physical dramas in this era of climate-induced upheaval, but on the Outer Banks-a strip of sand a few miles wide, at most, which is visited by millions of tourists each year-this pageant is particularly pronounced. Daniel Pullen has had an unobstructed view of this scene his whole life. Now forty-nine, he grew up in the town of Buxton, where a nineteen-seventies-era Navy base exacerbated coastal erosion by building a series of jetties to widen the beach, setting off a small boom in unwisely sited houses that are now being steadily reclaimed by the ocean."

"Pullen is a photographer, mostly of weddings and family portraits. "These islands are big for destination weddings," he told me. "I do a little bit of commercial work, a little bit of documentary work. But it's difficult to live here. All of your work is concentrated in a six-month period, and then you hope you stacked up enough to make it through the lean months. It's not a winter wedding destination-it gets pretty raw on the beach then.""

The Outer Banks are highly dynamic barrier islands where waves and wind naturally move sand from the ocean edge to the leeward side. Rising sea levels and warmer oceans producing stronger storms have intensified that natural shifting, accelerating coastal erosion. A nineteen-seventies-era Navy base built jetties that exacerbated shoreline loss and encouraged construction in vulnerable locations. Houses built on that widened beach are being steadily reclaimed by the ocean, with several collapsing into the sea recently. Daniel Pullen, a lifelong Buxton resident and photographer, documents the destruction and the seasonal economic fragility of island life through striking images.

Read at The New Yorker