To understand how Cape Fear’s
ghost trees came to be, we must delve
into history, geologic and human.
Eagle Island, home of the USS North Carolina battleship, is also home to many
dead trees.
and its tributaries, ghost
trees provide evidence
of more recent history,
as unintended victims
of human activity that
includes deepening a
freshwater river to a salt-water
sea. Snagging old
logs and channelizing
the Cape Fear River dur-ing
the past 200 years
has allowed ever-larger
ships to slip upstream to
Wilmington, but these
activities also enabled salt-water
from the Atlantic
Ocean to slip upstream,
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WBM
in the process converting
what was once freshwater
swamp and marsh into
what is now a wide and
productive brackish estu-ary,
complete with grassy
saltmarshes and tidal
creeks harboring blue
crabs, shrimp and many
kinds of saltwater fishes of
commercial, recreational
and ecological value.
Researchers are piecing
together the history
of the relatively recent
geologic past with help
from stumps and logs of
bygone forests observed
on the North Atlantic
seafloor near Denmark,
the Gulf of Mexico
seafloor off the coast of
Alabama, and the slanted
continental seafloor
off the North Carolina
coast. The historic path
of the Cape Fear’s now
drowned river channel
is evidenced by remains
of tree stumps standing
ghost-like on a seafloor
now submerged beneath
the waves of an inexora-bly
rising sea.