WaPo: “As the first light of day flickers across the Croatan Sound, Scott Lanier surveys the gray, barren tree trunks that stand in every direction, like massive gravestones marking the once-vibrant landscape.
“The forest is just retreating,” says Lanier, manager of this 160,000-acre federal wildlife refuge near North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Lanier first came here to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the mid-1980s and stayed several years before heading to postings around the Southeast. When he returned in 2006, a singular question reverberated in his mind as he drove around:
“What happened to the trees?”
The startling transformation he witnessed then has only accelerated in recent years. “It has changed dramatically,” he says, “and it has changed very quickly.”
Few examples of climate change are as unmistakable and arresting as the “ghost forests” proliferating along parts of the East Coast — and particularly throughout the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula of North Carolina.”