00:02It's a race against the clock to preserve the Brunswick Town Fort Anderson historic site
00:07along the coast of North Carolina. The pace of erosion has quickened to the point where
00:13we almost can't keep up with the loss of cultural features. East Carolina University
00:20Maritime Studies in partnership with the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology
00:25surveying this site since 2021. Slow and steady down. It's experiencing significant coastal erosion
00:33that's affecting both the marsh that borders the historic site and the river as well as any sort of
00:40submerged cultural features located beneath the marsh. They say so far they've tracked over 130
00:47feet of coastal erosion since 2021. This season alone, fall storms have washed away a critical route
00:54along the outer banks. You have documented sea level rise at Brunswick Town particularly. You have
01:02increased dredging activity in the river that's introducing more highly saline ocean water. Yet
01:10this erosion is a double-edged sword. Although it's actively destroying parts of the site,
01:14it's also somehow led the team to find a shipwreck, which they believe could possibly be La Fortuna,
01:20a Spanish privateer ship which exploded off the NC coast in 1748. The shipwreck had been
01:26catastrophically displaced. It was removed from the seabed and deposited on shore. And so we had to
01:34basically work with our state partners and perform an emergency recovery of this 40 feet of one side of
01:43an entire shipwreck. And with fast recoveries like these, it also means conservators back at the lab
01:48have to act quick too. It comes to the emergency recovery of an entire shipwreck or at least in part.
01:55That takes a lot of logistical planning and ensuring that we can safely store them here in the lab.
01:59The race continues to uncover what's been buried in the past and make sure a piece of history lives on.
02:05Reporting for AccuWeather, I'm Lauren Beachy.
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