By Grey Gowder, Executive Director, Carolina Ocean Alliance
“What is your water?” asked Dr. Wallace J. Nichols. This was far from the first time the founder of the Blue Mind movement asked this question. “What are your foundational memories of water, of the waters that shaped you?”
For residents of the South Carolina Lowcountry, we are tied to the waters around us and the life within them. As a child of the Lowcountry, my waters were the tidal pools, salt marshes, and “ghost creeks” rising from flooded streets. On summer vacations, they were the cool mountain streams of the Appalachians. In the late Summer and Fall, they were the warm winds and torrential rains of the tropical cyclones that drove us to higher ground. In the Winter, they were the salty brine of each slurped oyster. South Carolina is a state shaped by and connected by water.
In South Carolina, 30,000 miles of rivers and streams drain 20 million acres of land through 4.5 million acres of wetlands into the Atlantic Ocean. As rivers near the sea, they fan outward into vast deltas of sandbanks, marsh grasses, oyster reefs, and marsh islets. These are the nurseries of culturally significant species like flounder, shrimp, redfish, and blue crabs. From “the Edge of America” in Folly Beach’s wet sands, the State of South Carolina extends another 3 miles to the Shallow Shelf, and beyond that, the United States stretches nearly another 200 miles to the floating meadows of the Sargasso Sea. No matter where you live in the state, you are connected to the ocean and benefit from the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and their partners.
From the surface of the sun to the deepest corners of the ocean, NOAA helps us understand our world and prepare for and adapt to a changing climate. As our planet warms, our region will undergo rapid changes. It has never been more important for us to understand the ocean, how it is changing, how those changes will affect us, and what we can do to protect the communities and wild places we love. Species from the Caribbean and open ocean are migrating into our waters and some of our species are moving northward. A warming ocean drives supercharged storms to our coast, unleashing vast amounts of energy and water upon coastal and inland communities. Sea levels continue to rise, forcing hard decisions in flood plains and low-lying areas. Coastal communities need accurate and accessible data to build and strengthen resilience infrastructure, and plan for a future with stronger storms, higher king tides, and more volatile weather. NOAA measures, maps, studies, and invests in tools and strategies to protect our communities, our coastal economies, and the species that live alongside us.
For NOAA and SeaGrant, the world is a classroom where new discoveries transform our understanding of the world around us. When Rachel Carson wrote, “We can only sense that in the deep and turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved,” she may as well have been writing about our corner of the Atlantic Ocean, the South Atlantic Bight. Stretching from Cape Hatteras to Cape Canaveral, from the sea islands to the edge of the continental shelf, the South Atlantic Bight encompasses a vast and dynamic confluence of life with plenty of secrets awaiting discovery. Just a few years ago, NOAA scientists rewrote our understanding of the oceans when they discovered the largest deep-sea coral ecosystem on the planet in the dark depths of the Blake Plateau. This vast ecosystem of living coral mountains is linked through a colossal nutrient recycling pump to the ocean’s superhighway, the Gulf Stream, where migratory fish, birds, and mammals gather around the floating meadows of Sargassum weed alongside the seabirds, sea turtles, and sea creatures that begin their lives on our beaches and in our marshes. Over the next six years, new mapping of the seabed between our coast and the Blake Plateau will reveal even more ecosystems, shipwrecks, ancient riverbeds, and discoveries about the oceanic systems that shape our lives and the lives of the many other species that call our region home.
These are our waters, the waters that shape us, and will define our future as a coastal state. For less than 0.1% of the federal budget, NOAA helps us better understand these waters and our connection to them, protect the life within them, and ensure a resilient future for the communities that live alongside them.
About Carolina Ocean Alliance
Our mission is to develop leaders, cultivate ideas, inspire hope, and accelerate solutions to protect, preserve, and restore the coastal ecosystems of South Carolina. Our “network-of-networks” approach emphasizes multi-disciplinary collaboration to promote local solutions and advance young advocates from underrepresented communities in conservation, climate change, and regenerative processes.
About Grey Gowder
Grey Gowder, Impact Producer and filmmaker, founded the Carolina Ocean Alliance, The Hope Summit, and the regenerative storytelling brand Enduring Curiosity to promote and accelerate community-driven solutions to global challenges using the power of storytelling and civic ecology to change perspectives, inspire hope, and create lasting and self-restoring action. Grey also acts as the Executive Director for Oceans Connect, a Savannah-based nonprofit dedicated to strengthening our human connections with Georgia’s Continental Shelf and Blake Plateau and other critical marine habitats in the South Atlantic Bight through creative communications, exploration, discovery, education, and advocacy.