LARGE MARINE ARCHEOLOGICAL DATABASE FOR NORTH CAROLINA: 500-YEAR RECORD WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR STORM HISTORY

Beginning with data-gathering by geoscientists and historians leading to the successful search for the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor in 1973, a marine archeological compilation has been developed by geoscientists over four decades that now contains data for 2038 shipwrecks for North Carolina and another 2500 from nearby coastal states. This original database, presented here as a geologic record for the first time, spans from 1526-1984. The record differs from others in including both deep-water and coastal shipwrecks. It can be used to resolve a detailed paleoenvironmental history of hurricanes and other intense/widespread storms along the North Carolina continental margin.

A proof-of-concept paleoenvironmental analysis of the database using regressions readily identifies previously known large storms, including an 1846 hurricane so intense that it formed two of the region’s largest inlets—Hatteras and Oregon—overnight. In a second phase of analysis, the database documents a series of important additional storms whose intensity, character, and extent had not previously been documented.

Understanding this near-term geologic record of great storms in North Carolina has societal urgency: this region is among the US’s most vulnerable to storm surges with rising sealevel, with about a meter of increase predicted by century’s end.