Throughout the U.S. East Coast, trees are dying off as rising seas and higher storm surges push saltwater farther inland. While these ‘ghost forests’ are becoming more common in North Carolina’s coastal plain, scientists had only a rough idea of their extent. A new study mining 35 years of satellite images of a 245,000-acre area in the state’s Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula shows that, between 1985 and 2019, 11% of the area’s tree cover succumbed to saltwater.
