Oyster beds and rock formations can be seen in Bogue Sound near Morehead City.
Beyond that, a living shoreline provides additional benefits by creating a habitat for complex ecosystems, improving water quality, and outperforming hardened coastal barriers like sea walls or bulkheads. In a living shoreline, sills act to break up bigger waves while the vegetative elements dissipate smaller ones, stabilizing the shoreline and halting erosion. A living shoreline incorporates vegetative elements like salt marshes with sills, physical barriers like oyster reefs, rock piles, or large, anchored wooden structures. Haddad believes that creating living shorelines could reduce wave energy that leads to erosion along coastal estuaries. This past May, the problem garnered the national spotlight when two houses in Rodanthe collapsed into the sea on the same day. Communities along the Outer Banks have been working to mitigate the loss of shorelines for decades. Persistent shoreline erosion along coastal North Carolina is nothing new. “And now I can’t help but feel a sense of wonder and glee when I’m out just looking at waves. “As I started to learn about the physics of waves, I really started to see things very differently at the beach,” Haddad says. Haddad is a PhD candidate in physical oceanography, and her research informs her unique perspective on waves and fuels her fascination.
Standing on the dock outside the UNC Institute of Marine Science (IMS), she can’t help but break into a smile when she talks about the “tidal range,” “dissipation of wave energy,” and “cross-shore transect” when describing the mechanics of waves. When Jana Haddad describes the small waves and boat wakes that roll into shore from Bogue Sound in Morehead City, she speaks with the kind of enthusiasm that makes her fascination with ocean waves obvious despite her technical language.
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