We don’t need to go to NC to find “ghost trees’. Here on the Northern Neck check out the ghost trees at Hughlett Point NAP and Belle Isle State Park along Watch House Trail. photo by Marty Hill
The swift march of climate change in North Carolina’s ‘ghost forests’
As sea levels rise and storms become more intense, scientists are racing to study the rapid loss of trees and marshland along the Outer Banks
By Brady Dennis
The Washington Post
May 12, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
ALLIGATOR RIVER NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, N.C. — As the first light of day flickers across the Croatan Sound, Scott Lanier surveys the gray, barren tree trunks that stand in every direction, like massive gravestones marking the once-vibrant landscape.
“The forest is just retreating,” says Lanier, manager of this 160,000-acre federal wildlife refuge near North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Lanier first came here to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the mid-1980s and stayed several years before heading to postings around the Southeast. When he returned in 2006, a singular question reverberated in his mind as he drove around:
“What happened to the trees?”