Editor’s note: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Albert Scardino, who now lives in Bluffton, recently offered this commentary exclusively to the Charleston City Paper about South Carolina’s coastline. It’s in The Nation’s 160th anniversary issue, “These Dis-United States.”
The low-lying coast of South Carolina—all 187 miles of it, the home to 1.4 million people—may be a sandcastle on the beach facing an incoming tide.
Satellite imagery shows that the ocean is rising faster and the ground is sinking more rapidly there than almost anywhere else between Canada and Mexico, a combined change of roughly one inch a year that may be accelerating.
Nancy Mace, the member of Congress who represents the region, is determined to keep balls out of the women’s stalls on Capitol Hill, as she put it during her campaign against transgender people earlier this year. Mace’s district had been competitive before 2020; then the Legislature packed much of Charleston into an adjacent Democratic district, giving her a 14-point partisan advantage.
Representative Buddy Carter, from neighboring coastal Georgia, is pushing a bill to rename Greenland “Red, White and Blueland.” Carter’s district is sinking, too. His state’s legislature, also dominated by Republicans, did him a similar favor.
The Atlantic coastal crescent here is a movable line. At different moments in recent geological times, it has existed 30 miles farther out or 30 miles farther inland, always a string of sand beaches and dunes never more than 30 feet above the sea. When ocean levels dropped during ice ages, the offshore sandbars grew into barrier islands. When seas rose, the old barrier islands farther inland became new ones again.
The Gulf Stream flows north much farther out along the shallow continental shelf here than it does off Florida or North Carolina, creating a reverse eddy in the shallow pool up against the coast. This eddy carries sand south from one island beach to the next for almost 300 miles, from Cape Hatteras to St. Augustine. There isn’t any rock on the surface to hold the sand, only a layer of porous limestone buried under 30 feet of old ocean sediment and another 30 feet of clay.
That layer of porous limestone carries another stream of water, drained from the foothills of the Appalachians. By the time this freshwater arrives 60 feet beneath the coastline, the flow behind it is pushing it through clay and sand to form artesian ponds and freshwater swamps.
These swamps, broad salt marshes, strong tides and deep estuaries created a pristine wilderness. With abandoned rice and sea-island cotton plantations, the sparsely settled South Carolina–Georgia coast is about the same size on a map as the Grand Canyon, but its deepest points are rarely more than 30 feet below the water in the sounds along the coast, the highest 30 feet on the top of sand dunes above the beaches.
Then came the paper industry. Then the bridges. Then the golf courses. Now the tourists—more than 40 million of them each year. So much water is being pumped from the limestone that the pressure that used to support the sand above it has dropped. The ground is sinking.
In 1893, a hurricane drove up along the coast from Florida. The front edge of the storm pushed against the southward-flowing coastal currents, creating a 16-foot swell ahead of it. More than 2,000 people drowned. The seas inundated much of Hilton Head, the largest of South Carolina’s islands. The population of Hilton Head Island in 1950 was just 300; today, it is 40,000. But in August—the month of the 1893 storm—there may be more than 125,000 visitors who have come for the hard-packed beaches and 26 championship golf courses. The island is accessible by one road over the Intracoastal Waterway.
Bluffton resident Albert Scardino, who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing when he ran The Georgia Gazette in Savannah, is a member of The Nation’s editorial board.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
