Saturday, September 5, 2026
By Brian Tress | Outer Banks Voice on May 30, 2026
During his May 28 presentation, titled “Holding the Line? Coastal Change and Barrier Island Dynamics on the Outer Banks,” Coastal Studies Institute (CSI) Executive Director Dr. Reide Corbett examined the science behind erosion, sea-level rise, storms and shoreline migration — and the increasingly difficult tradeoffs facing communities built on a landscape shaped by movement.
Recent oceanfront house collapses in Rodanthe and Buxton have pushed coastal erosion into the public conversation, often accompanied by renewed debate over beach nourishment and whether the state should reconsider its long-standing prohibition on hardened shoreline structures such as seawalls, groins that trap sand, and rock revetments designed to buffer wave action. But he emphasized that Thursday’s talk was not intended to advocate for any single answer.
“Tonight is not about choosing a side,” Corbett told the audience. “It’s about understanding the science, tradeoffs and tools.”
Throughout the presentation, Corbett stressed that coastal change on the Outer Banks cannot be stopped entirely, but that communities will likely need a mix of approaches, each carrying its own tradeoffs depending on place, cost, time horizon and what is being protected.
For Corbett — who grew up in Havelock, spent time surfing the Outer Banks as a teenager, earned a doctorate in oceanography and has led CSI since 2016 — the urgency of the conversation lies partly in how visible coastal change has become, but also in how easily barrier islands can be misunderstood.
“The recent house collapses in Rodanthe and Buxton brought a tremendous amount of public attention to shoreline change on the Outer Banks,” he said. “With that attention came a lot of important questions, but also confusion about the science, the processes driving erosion, and what different management approaches actually do.”
At the center of his presentation was a reminder that the Outer Banks are not fixed landforms but dynamic barrier islands — long, narrow stretches of sand that have always shifted with storms, tides and rising seas. Barrier islands, he explained, survive by moving.
Storm overwash, often viewed solely as destructive, is actually part of how islands sustain themselves over time, carrying sand inland, building elevation and helping the islands gradually migrate landward as sea levels rise. Corbett emphasized that the same processes that are capable of washing over roads and threatening homes are the ones that have shaped the Outer Banks for thousands of years.
“The past is a window into the future,” Corbett said, explaining that North Carolina’s barrier islands have been “dynamically changing since they emerged” thousands of years ago after the last glacial maximum — a period when Earth’s ice sheets were at their largest and sea levels much lower than today.
What is different today, he stressed, is not the existence of shoreline change but the level of infrastructure now occupying places long shaped by movement.
Using historical aerial imagery and shoreline data, Corbett showed how stretches of coast in places like Rodanthe, Buxton and South Nags Head have shifted dramatically over time — sometimes by hundreds of feet. In one slide comparing shoreline positions decades apart, he offered a succinct explanation for why oceanfront homes have increasingly toppled into the Atlantic.
“The beach moved — the houses didn’t.”
Many of the homes that recently collapsed, he noted, were built between the 1970s and 1990s, when sea level was lower and shorelines farther seaward. Continued erosion, combined with rising seas, has gradually narrowed the distance between houses and the ocean. By some estimates presented on Thursday, sea level in North Carolina could rise between roughly one and 1.4 feet by 2050 and between two and four feet by 2100 under intermediate scenarios.
Corbett also pointed to another, less visible consequence of rising seas: groundwater.
“As sea level rises, flooding on barrier islands is no longer just about storms — it is increasingly driven by water rising from beneath our feet,” he said, citing research showing higher groundwater tables can slow drainage, worsen nuisance flooding and increasingly affect roads, septic systems and homes even on calm days.
He also questioned whether our current building codes fully account for what he described as the “lack of permanence” on barrier islands. While noting that some construction practices have changed since the 1970s and 1980s — including homes being supported by deeper pilings — he said that stronger or more durable materials, such as concrete construction, often face resistance because of higher costs.
Likewise, he described beach nourishment — now the Outer Banks’ primary erosion-management tool — as neither a cure-all nor a failure. Nourishment can temporarily widen beaches, buffer infrastructure and support tourism, he explained, but it does not stop erosion and requires repeated investment. As the presentation noted, “Nourishment buys time — it doesn’t stop the clock.”
The prospect of hardened shoreline structures — including seawalls, groins and revetments — also surfaced during the presentation. North Carolina has prohibited permanent hardened erosion-control structures on ocean shorelines, a policy under renewed scrutiny amid increasing erosion concerns, a bill in the NC Senate to repeal that hardened structure ban, and an expected Coastal Resources Commission science report on the topic. Yet Corbett avoided framing the issue as a binary choice.
“North Carolina is unique in the hardened structures ban, but it is also unique in its beautiful shoreline,” he said. “We are also very specific barrier islands, with a tremendous amount of energy along the coast that makes offshore solutions challenging.”
The questions communities face, he suggested, are more complicated: What exactly are they trying to protect? Where? For how long? And at what cost?
During the audience question-and-answer session, one attendee asked whether CSI’s studies on coastal change have been used by county planning departments.
“We have had conversations with Hyde and Dare,” Corbett responded, before jokingly characterizing his answer as “a circuitous way of saying no.” He added that “any changes in building codes should be driven by state policy.”
Before the lecture, Corbett said his hope was not that people leave believing coastal communities are doomed, nor that a single intervention will solve everything.
“There are very few simple answers on a barrier island coast,” he said. “Many people understandably want a single solution, but coastal systems are more complicated than that.”
View the CSI presentation Holding the Line? Coastal Change and Barrier-Island Dynamics on the Outer Banks.
Comments
Greg
The areas in Buxton and Rodanthe have been over-washed and damaged repeatedly since the 1960s. Building just continued in those places after buildings has washed away.
Kathy
This concise article made understanding this far from succinct problem Mother Nature has created and Mr. Corbett’s talk one for the record. Thank you Mr. Tress.
dylan
“Storm overwash, often viewed solely as destructive, is actually part of how islands sustain themselves over time, carrying sand inland, building elevation”
so all these “solutions” are, in the long run, really counter-productive and futile. Mother nature will not be thwarted.
Earl
That’s a really fine story.
-Thanks