Source: Star News Online

Excerpt:

They are the tall, grayish-white, often limbless sentinels that rise from the marshes as the mainland ends and North Carolina’s extensive coastal rivers, estuaries and sounds begin.

They are ghost forests, and clusters, sometimes hundreds of these dead and dying trees can be found lining the Cape Fear River and many of the Wilmington area’s tidal creeks and brackish channels. From Smith Creek near the Wilmington International Airport to Town Creek in Brunswick County and countless other local waterways, the carcasses of dying trees stick up from the marsh. Along shorelines, a graveyard of stumps is often visible.

These forests of tree skeletons can be found all along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and the Chesapeake Bay tracking north, and their ranks are growing as climate change combines with man’s engineering of the coast to allow salt water to seep farther and farther inland.

Read more: Are NC’s ‘ghost forests’ a canary in the coal mine for upcoming coastal change?