#Hatteras Island

[oldnorthcarolina]

Sow and Pigs, Cape Hatteras, NC, ca. 1900. Herbert Hutchinson Brimley Photograph Collection. State Archives of North Carolina.

[travelella]

Hatteras Island, Outer Banks, North Carolina, USA

Taken by Gene Gallin

[hatterasislandv]

Luxury Soundfront Vacation Rentals in Outer Banks, NC - Hatteras Island Rentals

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[froody]

This summer, do NOT let go and unwind on Myrtle Beach time.

Myrtle Beach South Carolina is what people who have never been to America think America is like. If I had a foreign friend who was into Americacore and really wanted the American experience, I’d take them to Myrtle Beach. Traumatizing, overwhelming, severely taxing on the senses and wallet and full of fascinating specimens of the southeastern hard drinking hard working lower middle class.

[ltwilliammowett]

In door no. 10 we have a couple today. The US Brig Niagara and HMS Bounty, aren't they cute together?

More about them here:

The Bounty was a British three-master on which one of the most famous mutinies in maritime history took place on 28 April 1789 near Tonga. Since then, the story of the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ has repeatedly become the subject of novels, non-fiction books, films, theatre plays and radio plays.

The merchant ship, built in Hull in 1784 and originally used as a coal freighter under the name Bethia, was purchased by the British Admiralty for an expedition to the South Seas. After extensive modifications, it set off on a voyage to Tahiti in 1787 under the command of Lieutenant William Bligh of Spithead to bring cuttings of the breadfruit tree from there to the Antilles. After their exploits, the mutineers settled on the remote island of Pitcairn. Off its coast, they set fire to the Bounty.

The Bounty here, however, was a replica from the 18th century built in 1960 and 1961. It was built especially for the film Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). The ship was sometimes referred to as HMS Bounty II or variants thereof to distinguish it from the original, but neither the abbreviation HMS, which is reserved for British naval vessels, nor the numbers were part of the ship's name. After being used in several other films, she was used for charter and adventure trips with passengers and as a museum ship.

Unfortunately, she sank off Cape Hatteras during Hurricane Sandy on 29 October 2012 with the loss of two crew members.

The U.S. Brig Niagara, otherwise known as Flagship Niagara. This version here of ‘the Brig’ is a replica reproduction of Oliver Hazard Perry's relief flagship during the American victory at the Battle of Lake Erie on 10 September, 1813. All iterations of this ship were constructed within the sheltered natural harbour of Presque Isle Bay in Erie, Pennsylvania including this version which began construction in 1988. Her first sailing season commenced in 1992 and has been sailing nearly continuously since.

[softspiderling]

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

You rarely had a night by yourselves most days.

Majority of them, you were either hanging out with Rafe, yours or his place, didn’t really make a difference, or you were out with your friends.

This Saturday night, you were by yourself, a rare occasion.

Rafe and Sarah were in Charleston with their family for some charity that Rose was a part of. When Rafe first invited you to come, you declined, saying you’d rather stay home and hang with your friends or something (he was huffing and puffing about it for hours afterwards, until you made it up to him). When the weekend came around, you realized that all of your friends seemed to be busy: Cleo and Pope were driving out to fish with his parents and made a whole weekend out of it, John B and JJ went to Hatteras island for some surfing competition and Kie had to help her parents at the Wreck because they were hosting an event.

John B and JJ had invited you to tag along, but you a: you weren’t a good enough of a surfer to participate in the competition and b: you didn’t want to sit at the beach by yourself while the boys were in the water. You had half a mind to take up Rafe for the invitation to the charity but it was extremely last minute and you didn’t have anything to wear so you scratched that idea and came to terms with spending your Saturday night by yourself.

Since the event at the Wreck didn’t start until 7, you spent the day hanging out there with Kie, snacking on some fries, drinking your weight in iced tea and texting Rafe until you had to leave to let Kie prep for the event.

you: i’m actually so bored, i’m starting to regret not coming with you 😞

rafe❤️: told you to come, didn’t i?

rafe❤️: shows that you should always listen to me.

you: pfff, please, that is not the moral of the story.

you: maybe i’ll just go to a party 🤪

rafe❤️: funny.

You tossed your phone on the couch and ran your hand through your air, sighing in frustration. As you reached for your phone again for mindless scrolling, your eye caught onto your nails, and you paused. You hadn’t done your nails in a while, mostly because you were so busy. But now would be the perfect opportunity. So you got all your nail polishes and tools out of your closet and started on prep.

About four hours later you still weren’t done. You spent the first hour on looking for inspiration on Pinterest and then the next half hour booting up Netflix so you had something to watch while you were doing your nails. Your iced coke was chilling on the table, the UV lamp curing the last layer of polish on your right hand before you could finish with top coat. Your phone was long dead, but you were too lazy to get up from the table to plug it in, your back killing you from sitting hunched over your table for so long. Yawning, you put on the top coat on your last nail before sticking your hand under the lamp, ready to fall go to bed right after you were done. Now you remembered why you hadn’t done your nails for a while. After you were finished, you packed all the things away, plugged your phone into the charger and passed out in bed.

You woke up with a start, disoriented for a second. It felt like you’d been asleep for barely an hour, but you were unsure what woke you from the slumber, when the door bell rang again.

“What the hell,” you muttered to yourself, throwing a sweater over before you padded downstairs, hearing that the person at the door has begun to knock excessively.

“Jesus Christ, I’ll be right there!” you called, hurrying down the stairs. You glanced through the window, trying to see what psycho was ringing on your doorbell in the middle of the night, just to see Rafe standing in front of the door, clearly upset.

You opened the door, barely getting a word in before he rushed inside, grabbing your arms.

“Rafe, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked hotly, staring at you before looking you up and down. “Who have you been with? Why the fuck didn’t you text me back?”

You were starting to get anxious from his behavior and you cupped his face. “Rafe, stop. Breathe. What happened?”

Rafe took a deep breath, shutting his eyes for a second.

“You haven’t replied to a text since like before eight, and your last message was about going to a party. I thought something had happened,” he gritted out. “No one was able to reach you and my calls weren’t getting through to you.”

You exhaled deeply. “God, I thought something happened to Sarah. I’m fine, babe. I was doing my nails and my phone died,” you explained, lifting your hand to show off your nails. Rafe looked at him, his eyes narrowed.

“Pretty,” he grunted, before wrapping his arms around you. “Never do that again.”

As you hugged him, you could feel the tension bleed out from his limbs and you couldn’t help but smile into his shirt.

“You’re crazy, Rafe. As if I would ever go to a party by myself,” you huffed, pulling away to look up at him. “How did you even get here so fast? I thought you guys were supposed to spend the night in Charleston.”

Rafe clenched his jaw. “I took the boat. Ward is super pissed off because I left them stranded.”

You bit back a laugh, only shaking your head at your boyfriend.

“You’re such a worrier, I was asleep.”

“Yeah, well, how the fuck was I supposed to know that?” he muttered, pulling you back into his arms.

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author's note: quick lil drabble bc i thought of how unreachable i am when doing my nails

[rae2velarisart]

art by @bibillustrate

Screenshots:

ACOSF Bonus Chapter Azriel

https://everygirllovessparkles.com/blogs/news/what-is-the-rarest-stained-glass-color

https://islandfreepress.org/hatteras-island-features/a-beachcombers-view-purple-seaglass/

[thedeviltohisangel]

All The Things I Did (Modern Era): You'd Have to Stop the World Just to Stop the Feeling

a/n: when I said my brain couldn't stop thinking of AUs...I kind of like the idea that Cass/John's souls reincarnate across time because they are always meant to be together. This is one example of that. It's been rattling in my brain for a little while and I've gotten it on paper and hope you fall just as deeply in love with this version as you have the original. Let me know your thoughts on this era and anything specific you might wish to see. love you xoxo

She felt absolutely miserable. The satin of her champagne colored dress was itchy against her skin and the halter felt like it was choking her and if the Russian Ambassador looked at her bare back like it was a lost wonder of the world one more time she was going to have her forearm against his windpipe in an instant. There was also the absolutely offensive paper weight of a diamond ring on her left hand. She thinks if she threw it hard enough, it could break through the wall of the Embassy’s reception room like a bullet. 

“My, my, Miss Cooper. You are looking particularly diplomatic tonight.” 

“Dimitri. I asked the bartender to throw away all the vodka so you wouldn’t bother me over here.” She fully knew he was SVR and she assumed he was tracking her State Department cover as loosely intact. 

“Come now, my little eagle. I’ve spent all night waiting for you to come flirt with me like you always do. You’ve really kept me waiting.” 

“If that’s flirting, things must be very bleak in Russia.” Originally, she had thought she’d try her hand at developing him. He had tried to develop her right back. She dropped her official pursuit of him but the back and forth kept her busy at the stuffy cocktail hours she had to attend. Cass would have preferred to be out in the local villages and talking to the people and the families and the culture she was falling in love with. 

“Eh maybe our flirting isn’t great but that new American soldier is looking at you like he wants you in a way us Russian men are very familiar with.” She didn’t have to look to know it was John. His arrival a few days ago had rocked her to the very core and she had done everything in her power to avoid him since. “He the one who put that ring on your finger?”

“If you were half as good as you want me to believe, Dimitri, you’d know. Enjoy your night.” Cass finished off her drink and turned to leave when his hand shot out and wrapped around her wrist. “Let go of me.”

“Miss Cooper, I’m not-”

“She asked you politely. I won’t offer the same courtesy.” A lump lodged in her throat as she felt John’s presence behind her. Her arm was dropped in an instant and she crossed it against her chest. 

“Good night, my little eagle.” Dimitir looked at her like he had gotten the exact answer he wanted. She itched to slap the victorious smirk off his face as he walked away. 

“You okay? He hurt you?” John touched her wrist tenderly, lovingly, all the things she hadn’t felt against her skin since she fled North Carolina a few months ago. 

“I was handling it. He did it on purpose to see how you’d react.” He dropped her arm as the glint of a diamond caught his eye. Took a step back to physically distance himself from the object.

“Sorry to disappoint.” He thought about tacking on an again but thought better of it. If she wasn’t in the mood to talk to him, maybe she never would be, then he wasn’t going to broach down the pathway.

“Not it’s…there’s no way you would have known.” She looked at him, for the first time since they said goodbye bathed in the moonlight on the beaches of Hatteras Island, and he felt his world shift back into place under her gaze. “Thank you.” 

“Can I at least get you a refill?” It felt like dipping her toes back in those North Carolina waters. A place she had told herself was too dangerous to go back to. He looked too good in his blues to turn down.

“Yes.” His hand on the small of her back guided her closer to the bar and it felt so warm she could lose herself in it.

“Two of whatever the lady was having.” 

“It’s just Coke in a rocks glass, Major.” She smiled as he took a long and satisfying sip either way. 

“Still delicious,” he laughed. “You been out here awhile?” Her eyes found the corner of her cocktail napkin much more interesting all of a sudden.

“Since…since around the last time I saw you.” He nodded around the last of his soda. Wished it was full of rum. 

“You could have just told me the truth. I would have understood.” Cass shook her head.

“No, you would have fought for me and told me we would find a way to make it work.” She distinctly remembered the look in his eyes on the beach that night. The frustration at her secrecy. The distress at her leaving when he had spent the whole summer learning how to love her. The anger that she acted like the truck bed nights and T6 flights and long weekends spent in bed could be tucked back into a box. He had wanted to scream that he was in love with her. Scream that he knew what was between them was meant to last a lifetime and he would fight for her until the ends of the earth. Scream that this war had already taken so much from so many and they shouldn’t let it take this from them. 

“Would it have worked? Clearly, you had something else lined up anyways.” Instead, John had felt defeated. Had heard the words that she was leaving and couldn’t tell him where or why and it was better to leave this summer exactly where they were standing. “My sister sent me the photos of you and him at some Newport mansion.” 

“It’s not real. You have to believe me.” Cass would have rather died than know John had seen the staged engagement photos. But the point of a PR campaign was for people to see the evidence. 

“You don’t owe me an explanation, Cass.” He turned toward the calling of his name from his fellow pilots. They had been joined by a group of young women who all looked eager to head back to their housing units for the after party. 

“Looks like you have a fun night ahead of you.” Pilots were always a hot commodity no matter where they went. And John was tall and handsome and pilot and goofy and…there was nothing wrong with him that she could come up with besides his love for her. 

“Are you done for the night? I can walk you back.” She nodded, something about the gaggle of girls waiting for him making her chest ache. “I’ll get your coat.”

They walked in silence at a safe distance. Both of them were walking slower than usual. They didn’t want the fact that they were back in each other’s presence to end. Her housing complex came into view all too quickly. “Nice housing for an alleged entry level econ analyst.”

“Guess I’m just special,” she remarked. He looked at her with a smile while she glanced up at the moon. “He’s running for Congress. Landry. He offered to help my sister fix a problem if I agreed to pretend to be with him for the campaign.” 

“Why’re you telling me?” He took a tentative step closer to her. 

“Because you asked earlier if it would’ve worked. And it would have. I wanted to tell you the truth about Afghanistan and my job. But my sister made a mistake and there was a way for me to protect her from the consequences and I had to take it.” She fiddled with the buttons of his jacket as tears trickled down her cheeks. “It killed me to say those things to you. I didn’t mean any of it. Those few months we shared together were the best of my life and I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything and I’m sorry I got in the way of the things we dreamt about under the stars every night.” 

“Give me your hand, Cass.” With a furrowed brow, she offered him her left hand and he locked his eyes onto hers. He slid the ring off her finger and her breath caught in her throat as he held it up between them. “I’ll make sure this is hand delivered to Mr. Landry.” The ring dropped into his pocket.

“Will you kiss me now, John Egan?”

“Only because you asked so nicely, Cassandra Cooper.” It felt like coming home when his lips touched hers. It felt like the first warm day after a dull winter. Like seeing your favorite movie again. Like the first bite of the food you’ve been craving. 

He had thought about trying to track her down. Thought about paying off an intel officer or sweet talking the personnel lady on the fifth floor into looking her up but had always been struck by the look in her eyes when she had left him that night. Begging him to just let it be. Begging him to let her go. Begging him to spare her the pain of his words because the solemn emptiness of her soul was the only thing that would allow her to turn around and leave him behind. 

She hadn’t been able to think about him. Not if she wanted to survive. Not when she needed to shut down and smile and pretend to fall in love with the weasel of man that had cunningly offered to help her sister. Cass hadn’t been able to say no. Her only regret was that she hadn’t been able to tell him herself. 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, please forgive me.” But she would never be able to forgive herself for taking away all the time they could have had together. 

“Already forgiven, Cass, I promise.” It was easy to forgive the people you loved. Less so to forget. Less so to heal from the wounds they inflicted on you. She had hurt him so deeply. Eroded all the trust he had in her. Eroded the trust he had for his own gut instinct. Kissing it better was one thing. Picking where they had left off was something else entirely.

“I want to try, John. I want to start over and I want to do this the right way. Even if it’s hard.” 

“I’ll choose us every goddamn day, Cass.” She kept her hands on his cheeks as she dropped back down from her toes. “You look stunning tonight. I didn’t get the chance to tell you.” John began to lead her in a dance that could only be heard between the matching, racing beats of their hearts. 

“Thank you but anything is going to look more stunning than the camis you saw me in all summer.” He kissed her with a laugh. 

“You looked stunning in those too.” Lest she forget that was exactly how he had fallen in love with her in the first place. Low bun and camo pants and rolling her eyes every time a pilot tried to flirt with her. She had beaten a particularly persistent one in a pull up contest to prove her point. “Cass?”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to go on a date with me tomorrow?” She looked around at the mountains and desert. At the bland buildings and miscellaneous pods of gym equipment. 

“I suppose.” Their original first date had been to a seafood shack where they broke down their own crabs and were covered in Old Bay and laughed as they walked along the pier and he had kissed her senseless while the sun set over the water. It was the most perfect memory. “Though I doubt you can top our first first date.” John smiled and traced the tip of his nose up and down the side of her cheek. 

“I just want to be with you, Cass. Make you feel special. Remind us both that there is still good in this world worth fighting for.” 

“I like the way that sounds,” she whispered as she pressed a kiss to his jaw. “You’ll find me when your day is over?” 

You’ll always find me?

I’ll always find you. In this life, or any other. 

When two souls are meant to tangle together across the universe there is no timeline that can halt them. There would be time apart and forces who tried to keep them that way but none would succeed. You cannot prevent the inevitable. 

Two stars colliding into a supernova with no limit in sight. There was no before. There was no after. Only them.

“Yes, Cass. I’ll find you.”

[starswallowingsea]

I have one (1) person saying they'd like a post about different styles of lighthouses so that's what this is going to be. As lighthouses serve as aids to navigation both during the day and at night, they have to stand out from each other so every lighthouse will look unique in some form or another. On top of that, many lighthouses were built out in the water and their structures had to be able to withstand the harsh weather in the open water (which not all of them did, several structures have been washed away in particularly powerful storms and had to be rebuilt). Under the cut will be several images of various lighthouses and the different classifications of these structures.

The first type of lighthouse we'll discuss in this post is the integrated lighthouse. Wikipedia describes these lighthouses as "...a lighthouse in which the tower and keeper's dwelling are united in one structure." This refers to lighthouses on land almost exclusively, but these lighthouses take on many different appearances. There are some standard designs, such as the school house design used at South Fox Island and Copper Harbor in Michigan (below), and others are more unique in their designs.

Both of these lighthouses, South Fox Island and Copper Harbor respectively, follow a standard "schoolhouse" design in their basic structure, however to tell them apart, they were given different daymarks, such as South Fox Island's whitewashed brick compared to Copper Harbor's natural cream brick. These differences help sailors to identify which specific lighthouse they're passing by and every single lighthouse will look at least slightly different, especially if it was constructed during the golden age of lighthouse construction, generally considered to be from about 1840-1910 (and obviously lighthouses were constructed before and after this period, but these 70 years saw a huge expansion in lighthouse construction, in part, due to the invention of the fresnel lens and the ability to mass produce them in France).

Not all lighthouses constructed on land are considered to be integrated lighthouses, however. Lighthouses like the one at Cape Hatteras are simply the tower, with the keepers' quarters often being nearby to the structure, but not attached. Cape Hatteras is also one of very few lighthouses bearing a "barber pole" daymark. So far as I can tell, only three lights in the US have this daymark, including St. Augustine in Florida and White Shoal in Michigan (which we'll discuss a little later).

Pictured above: Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, North Carolina, United States // Contis Plage Lighthouse, Landes, France. Both of these lighthouses are towers detached from any keepers quarters.

These are the two most common lighthouses you'll find on land, but what about those lighthouses built on the water? Well, they're divided into a few different categories: Caisson lighthouses, Screw-pile lighthouses, and Crib lighthouses.

Let's start with the Screw-pile lights. These were some of the first lighthouses built out on the water, with their piles being screwed into the mud and sand. These are actually slightly modified from older straightpile or simply pile lighthouses, differing mostly in the shape of the structure. Straightpile lights were taller and more skeletal compared to screw-pile lights. These structures had open legs which helped alleviate some pressure from the waves crashing on the structure, literally just giving them less surface area to hit and damage.

Above: Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, Florida, United States // Chesapeake Bay Lighthouse, Maryland, United States. Fowey Rocks is a Pile Lighthouse and Chesapeake Bay is a Screw-pile lighthouse. Both types of lighthouse included a keepers quarters in the structure above the water on a suspended platform, but are not considered integrated lighthouses like their mainland counterparts.

Caisson Lighthouses were created in response to Screw-pile lights, being both cheaper to build and sturdier as a structure. These lighthouses were built on metal or concrete caissons which were screwed into the sediments, with the rest of the structure completed on top. These lighthouses weren't immune to accidents though, as seen with the Sharps Island lighthouse in Maryland, which was knocked on an angle from an ice floe in 1977 and remains at a tilt to this day. It was decommissioned in 2010.

Above: the Sharps Island Lighthouse, Maryland, United States. This lighthouse actually replaced earlier screw-pile lighthouses that were also destroyed by ice floes through the area. The keepers quarters on the last Screw-pile lighthouse was fully lifted off its legs and carried safely away by the ice floe and none of the keepers inside were hurt.

The final type of lighthouse built out on the water are the crib lighthouses. These lights were built on wood and concrete cribs, often in the Great Lakes region due to the composition of the lake beds. The first crib light was built in 1851 on Waugoshance Shoal and more lighthouses soon followed. The most striking of these crib lights is White Shoal, located near Waugoshance, which has the only red and white barber pole daymark in the United States. Both of these lighthouses are located in the Straits of Mackinac region, which has ~15 lighthouses, including several crib lights (Gray's Reef, Poe Reef, and Spectacle Reef, just to name a few).

Above: Waugoshance Shoal Lighthouse // White Shoal Lighthouse, both located in the Straits of Mackinac, Michigan, United States. Waugoshance Shoal sits in just 4 feet of water, making it very difficult to access for repairs and restoration. The lighthouse was used as bomb target practice during the second World War due to it's location inland and the fact that it had been decommissioned in the 1930s. It still retains it's iconic birdcage lantern room, one of only four that survives in the United States.

There is one more type of lighthouse to discuss, and those are skeletal tower lighthouses. Not every skeletal tower light is considered an official lighthouse for a variety of reasons, but there were a number of lights built in this style. They are very reminiscent of pile lighthouses with their open frams, though skeletal towers can be built on shore as well. They became popular due to the relative ease of construction in remote locations, and that they could be deconstructed and reconstructed if need be. One of the most famous lighthouses built in this manner is Whitefish Point, where the modern Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is located and where you can still go and see the bell of the infamous Edmund Fitzgerald, which was the last major wreck on the lakes occurring in 1975.

Above: Two different angles of the Whitefish Point Lighthouse. It contains a central staircase in a white column. This lighthouse was not operational during that November gale in 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, as the captain noted how inconvenient it was that the light was out in one of his final transmissions. Thankfully there has not been a major shipwreck since then, though shipping culture on the Great Lakes is a whole other post in and of itself.

These are just a few examples of lighthouses, and these structures decorate the coasts of our oceans and several lakes in the world to help ships navigate the rough waters and stay safer on their journeys. I hope you learned something about lighthouses here and can appreciate the effort put into creating them just a little bit more! If you'd like to learn more about American Lighthouses, I'd recommend reading Brilliant Beacons by Eric Jay Dolin, which is where I got a lot of this information, and it includes a lot of anecdotes about lighthouses and their keepers throughout the country.

Above: Cape Agulhas Lighthouse, South Africa // Yokohama Breakwater Light, Japan. Just showing some more examples of lighthouses outside of the United States. Can you identify what types of lighthouses these are?

[wandering-jana]

Bodie Island Lighthouse.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore, North Carolina.

April 2022

[dailylighthouse]

Keep putting it off

Here's the latest of my lighthouse adventures!

Featuring Bodie Island Lighthouse, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum and The Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse

Bodie Island was definitely a highlight this time! We climbed it at night during a full moon and went back for more pictures another night.

[oldnorthcarolina]

Razor back Hog, Cape Hatteras Beach, ca. 1905. Herbert Hutchinson Brimley Photograph Collection. State Archives of North Carolina.

[sparkiekong]

Tag Game Questionnaire!

Ty for the tag @pixel-bloom!

🎵 Last song I listened to: Little Red Corvette - Prince

🌊 Favorite place: Hatteras NC - Every time I go I feel like I'm home.... but that's not where I actually live. It's just where I feel most like I should be.

📚 Currently reading: Nada - Haven't seen a book yet that interests me enough to read today. I usually scour the net for archaeology and science articles.

🧾Favorite book(s): The Sword of Truth (I got about 8 books in before I lost interest. The first 5 were amazing.)

📺 Favorite TV show: Supernatural, Resident Alien, What We Do In The Shadows, The Sandman, Deadboy Detectives .... also I'm an absolutely in love with Paranormal shows. Especially Paranormal Caught on Camera. It's a guilty pleasure.

💗 Favorite food: Anything POTATO... and Bananas... ask me what I want to eat on a deserted island.. those are my picks.

I'll tag @helenofsimblr @cawthorntales @holocene-sims @wannabecatwriter @miss-may-i - Anyone else who wants to and please feel free to ignore me.

[hatterasislandv]

10 Bedroom Vacation Rentals

Discover luxurious 10 bedroom vacation rentals in the Outer Banks at Hatteras Island Vacation Rentals. Enjoy expansive oceanfront views and ample space for large groups or families. Book your perfect 10 bedroom vacation house rental in OBX for a memorable beach getaway!

[mariacallous]

Rising sea levels, biodiversity collapse, extreme weather—these are the grisly horsemen of climate apocalypse. But don’t forget the fretting loan officers. A study published earlier this year found that US mortgage approvals tend to dip following periods of hotter-than-normal weather. For every 1 degree Celsius that temperatures rise above average, approvals fell by nearly 1 percent—and their value by more than 6.5 percent.

Lower consumer demand was only part of the problem, according to the study’s authors. The effect was mostly down to loan officers’ worries about climate change and what it might mean for the assets they were lending against. In other words, climate change was devaluing property before their very eyes.

It’s not just the heat. In May, yet another beachfront house in North Carolina’s Outer Banks tumbled into the angry sea. It’s the sixth home lost along Cape Hatteras National Seashore since 2020. Researchers say lenders are increasingly trying to pass on the risk of mortgaging coastal properties due to calamities like this. Wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding are also impacting other financial services used by homeowners. It’s increasingly difficult to get home insurance in Minnesota, for instance, following extreme hail storms in recent years.

Big money is finally waking up to the fact that climate change is a gigantic problem. Property is the world’s greatest store of wealth, with a total value just shy of $380 trillion. This is four times global GDP. But there’s a new kind of toxic asset emerging in property portfolios. The number of homes in what you might call “subprime” locations is rising and, in some parts of the world, property value—like a crumbing coastline—is at risk of erosion. Lenders are getting noticeably more reluctant to lend against these assets. No wonder. In the Asia-Pacific region, nearly one in 10 properties owned by real estate investment trusts could be at “high risk” of climate-change-related damage—particularly those on seafronts, a report from climate risk consultancy XDI announced in May.

“Some communities are just going to become much more expensive to preserve,” says Dave Burt, founder and CEO of DeltaTerra Capital. “There’s a gravitational pull on the value of those properties.” Some banks are starting to highlight climate risk to borrowers. HSBC’s UK website, for example, has a page about how climate change could affect people’s mortgages. But Burt argues that buyers aren’t always being told about the medium- and long-term risks, nor are they necessarily having the amount they borrow scrutinized in terms of how their home might plummet in value in the coming years.

And yet, plenty of people are still buying US coastal properties, for instance—and paying ever bigger sums for the pleasure. This fuels the common climate-change-denier claim that because “all the billionaires” are still buying coastal properties, climate change must be a hoax. As if, for some people, “billionaire” somehow equates to “prophet” rather than simply “presently wealthy person.”

The banks may be starting to wake up to the financial risks, but it’s worth acknowledging that climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for years. More than a decade ago, Laura Moore, a professor in coastal geomorphology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, expressed concern about the risks posed to properties built in the Outer Banks. Now, some of those homes are collapsing as storms rapidly reshape the islands.

The worst-affected of these properties happen to be located on a bend in the coastline that is a natural erosion hot spot, but sea-level rise induced by climate change is only likely to hasten the damage, says Moore, and bring it to other coastal locations. “It is already more difficult to insure homes in coastal areas,” she says. “We can expect that to become more and more the case going forward.”

Plus, in locations like the Outer Banks, you can’t just build a seawall to protect vulnerable properties. The Outer Banks are barrier islands whose position and elevation naturally shift over many years as waves move sand from the front to the rear of the islands. Sticking a big wall on the front means that process goes awry. “The interior of the island gets lower and lower over time, relative to sea level, and more susceptible from the backside to flooding,” explains Moore. So, in some places, no amount of engineering will solve the problem—which is what people like Burt are concerned about.

In areas where hardening a home could reduce its exposure to climate-related risks, though, banks have been “pretty slow” to roll out products that might help people pay for solutions, including structural improvements, or defenses against flooding and wildfires, says Burt. But there are signs that the financial industry is gradually moving toward helping homeowners adapt and respond to climate change in other ways.

Lenders have cottoned on to the fact that the energy efficiency of a property has an impact on its value as an asset, for instance. It keeps people’s utility bills low, improving their ability to pay off their mortgage, for example. In the UK, most homes now have a rating that defines the property’s perceived efficiency—A being the highest, G the lowest. This takes into account things like insulation, energy-efficient lighting, and the type of heating system installed. “Banks would love to have A-rated properties,” says Stewart Cummins, a partner at PwC, a consultancy.

Research from the Bank of England suggests people with energy-efficient properties are more likely to keep up with their mortgage payments. Lenders also benefit from a PR and regulatory perspective by reducing the emissions associated with the assets in their portfolios.

For a homeowner, too, retrofitting insulation or more efficient heating technology might seem like a good investment, because banks may be happier to lend against their property in the future. This is already emerging with the rise of “green mortgages” or “energy-efficient mortgages.” In some cases, such products offer better interest rates or cash-back bonuses to buyers of properties with good energy ratings. You might also get a green mortgage if you agree to use some of the funds for an energy efficient retrofit yourself.

“Retrofit is going to happen. If mortgage lenders are at the forefront of that, they are protecting their customers,” says Rachael Hunnisett, a green mortgage specialist at the UK’s Green Finance Institute. However, buyers might not yet be swayed too much by these offers, says the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries in the UK. Consumer demand for green mortgages in the country is “not quite there yet,” but that could change if energy efficiency ratings begin to have a strong impact on house prices, the organization adds.

Clean energy firms are reaping the rewards of this emerging shift. Aira, a Swedish firm that carries out heat pump installations, recently announced that it had struck a deal valued at €200 million ($214 million) for loan commitments from the bank BNP Paribas. This will allow Aira customers in Germany to pay for their heat pumps in installments.

“Banks and financial institutions have a huge responsibility to accelerate the energy transition,” says Eirik Winter, BNP Paribas’ CEO in the Nordic region. That the financing arrangement could also boost property values is a “positive side effect,” he adds.

Home renovations and energy retrofits are not cheap. Loans are often necessary to lower the barrier to entry sufficiently for consumers. Lisa Cooke works for MCS, a body that accredits heat pumps and installers in the UK. She was able to afford a heat pump herself, she says, thanks only to a government grant and just under £5,000 ($6,300) of financing from Aira. “That’s really what has made it achievable for me,” she says. “Even with savings, I wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise.”

Luca Bertalot, secretary general of the European Mortgage Federation—European Covered Bond Council, says there are huge risks to economic productivity if people can’t secure homes that protect them from the worst effects of climate change. In heat waves, he notes, worker productivity falls, meaning a negative impact on GDP. Conversely, he speaks of a kind of energy retrofit butterfly effect. If people make their home cheaper to cool or heat, perhaps they will save money, which they may spend on other things—their children’s education, say, which in turn improves their children’s chances of a comfortable life (and maybe of buying a climate-safe home themselves) in the future.

But there is still, perhaps, a sluggishness to recognize the storm that is coming. Energy efficiency does little to protect properties from the sharper effects of climate change—stronger storms, rising seas, wildfires, and floods. As governments become unable to cover the costs of these disasters, lenders and insurers will likely end up exposed to the risks. The US National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, is already creaking under the weight of rising debt.

“As the damages pile up, it could well be that the markets will become more efficient and the incentives [to harden properties] become stronger—because nobody’s bailing you out anymore,” says Ralf Toumi at Imperial College London, who consults for insurance firms.

Ultimately, climate change impacts on housing will force some to move elsewhere, suggests Burt. Given the irrevocability of some scenarios, such as coastal villages that could be lost to the sea, or communities that become doomed to endless drought, there are some assets that no amount of hardening or retrofit will ever save. The structural utility of these properties will, like water in a drying oasis, simply evaporate.

To lessen the burden on people who are most at risk of losing their home to climate change, affordable loans might one day be targeted at consumers in these areas to help them move to safer places, says Burt. Lenders who don’t take this approach, and who continue offering mortgages on homes destined to succumb to climate change, may soon rue the day. “If you’re trying to support those markets,” Burt says, “you’re throwing good money after bad.”

[emvisual]

The Inn at Rodanthe es una casa de playa en Hatteras Island, Carolina del Norte. La casa también protagonizó una película llamada Nights in Rodanthe con Diane Lane y Richard Gere.

Como el cambio climatico es una cosa de rojos y progres, la han cambiado de sitio para que no se la coma el mar.

Por culpa de los rojos, los de izquierdas y eso, no por el cambio climático....