| | | Battling the Sea on the Outer Banks
Daniel Pullen offers beautifully composed and striking images of the destruction that climate change has brought to his lifelong home.
By Bill McKibben
November 12, 2025
ven 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
ven 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....
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