Question.....how much foul weather can the outer banks take before they are lost to the sea? I'm on the west coast so my prayers are out for you guys in NC and surrounding areas in this slow moving storm.
The short answer it can't happen in our Milena except for an event that would raise sea levels 2-3'.
The banks are the remnants of ice age beach shores when sea levels were much lower. The sounds behind them were dry, low plains. Rising sea levels flooded the plains turning them into sounds and the high dune areas of the beaches became the barrier islands.
The Islands are in a constant state of movement, always migrating to the west. In a few Milena or eons there will be no banks or inland sounds in North Carolina. Hurricanes just speed up this process by over-washing the islands and pushing huge quantities of sand to the west. eventually this sand will sprout marsh grass and maybe even some maritime forest which will stabilize the area until the next weather catastrophe nibbles at it again.
This picture is from an over-wash at Drum Inlet, about 22 miles north of Cape Lookout. I camped toward the ocean in this picture in August of 2003 about 2 months before the eye of Hurricane Isabel crossed this exact location. Before the storm there was a huge whalebone pelvis at the ocean side of the edge of the dunes. I went back a year later and found the whale bone in the marsh on the edge of the sound. A Category 2 storm only moved it 300-400 yards.
