The latest mystery to wash up on North Carolina’s Outer Banks came Tuesday in the form of something resembling a big, black shark’s tooth.
It was made of something like clay — but was fibrous in texture.
Vacationer Sally Craig Wilson of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the first to notice the odd discovery and shared a photo on Facebook with a simple question: “What are these large mud like things on the beach?”
At least a dozen were spread across a beach on Pea Island and came in different sizes and shapes, Wilson said.
“It was strange that they were only in one place,” she added.
Among the guesses: whale poop and “oil mixed with seaweed.”
However, experts say her find is older and infinitely more interesting: The chunks are the remnants of a coastal marsh that was devoured decades if not centuries ago by the rising ocean.
Better known as peat, the flammable chunks of rotted vegetation are “direct evidence of dramatic” change on the Outer Banks, according to a National Park Service report. In some cases, entire outcroppings of peat are revealed by storms, the report says.
“Such an outcrop found on Shackleford indicated that a swamp forest of some type existed there around 200 years ago when sea level was lower and the beach (was) much farther to the south,” the park service reported.
Coastal Review Online, published by the North Carolina Coastal Federation, describes peat as a “hash of mud, muck and decaying plants and trees.”
Cape Hatteras National Seashore spokesman Michael Barber says chunks of peat are known to show up north of Buxton and Hatteras village.
“Old peat beds reside near and off shore as well as on both the ocean and sound side of Hatteras Island,” he told McClatchy News in an email. “During periods of bad weather, large chunks in varying shapes and sizes break away from the deteriorating peat deposits and wash up on the ocean shorelines.”
David Hallac, the superintendent of National Parks of Eastern North Carolina, says the chunks of peat could be remnants of an estuarine salt marsh. Estuaries are broad bodies of water that form where rivers reach the ocean, according to NOAA.
Tropical Storm Arthur, which brushed the coast Tuesday, may have eroded the sand and uncovered the bits of peat Wilson saw, Hallac told McClatchy News in an email.
Storms in 2019 uncovered “extensive historic marsh peats” on the north end of Ocracoke, along N.C. 12, he said.
“Generally speaking, the peat areas ... were probably formed hundreds of years ago,” Hallac said.
This story was originally published May 20, 2020 1:57 PM.