What's this blacktop-looking stuff in the water at North Topsail Beach?

The Rabbit Hole attempts to settle a long-standing debate over the dark and slimy debris along one of North Carolina's most well-known waterfronts.

Here’s a picture I came across on on Reddit earlier this month:

Some black slimy stuff on North Topsail Beach earlier this month (Via munchingrasshopper on Reddit)

This particular shot was taken on North Topsail Beach. The stuff below the water was black and slimy. The person who took the picture had a simple question: “What is this?”

That Reddit post was the latest attempt to answer a question that some people on the coast have been wondering about for years. A few months before, someone else asked Redditors about something black underneath the shallow water. “Walking out into the ocean first you feel sand and small shells/rocks under your feet,” that person wrote, “but when you walk deeper it feels like you’re walking over a hard, slightly slimy sheet of plastic, like a tarp.” The black stuff even shows up on satellite images from Google Maps:

The earliest mention of this that I could find was in 2008, when the Jacksonville Daily News reported that there was debris washing up between Villa Capriani and Public Access No. 4. That debris keeps coming back. “We typically get asked this once a year,” Alice Derian, North Topsail’s town manager, told me in an email.

Then, as now, people are strongly convinced that what they’re seeing has to be one of these two things:

• Chunks of an old abandoned road

• Peat

So then. Is this stuff just the thick black organic soil you find in marshes, bogs and swamps? Or is this part of a road that was taken out by hurricanes and erosion?

The Blacktop Beach Theory

First off, there’s a pretty convincing article that says what we’re seeing here is actually asphalt. “The Mystery of the Beach Blacktop” appeared in Topsail Magazine back in September 2020, and the writer presents a case based on the shifting roads that have been built on the shifting sands. Basically, there was once a road that ran just behind the dune line, one that kept getting washed out by storms. Developers saw an opportunity. If they could help move the road further inland, they could endear themselves to the public by creating a more storm-proof stretch of pavement. They also could help their bottom lines by freeing up that land for new oceanfront properties between the road and the beach.

Hence, in the early 1980s, developers Marlow Bostic and Roger Page first paid to move a short stretch of road that made way for the St. Regis Resort. Later, Page said he’d pay to move 4 miles worth of New River Inlet Road so he could create Villa Capriani, a condo complex. But! After 2.7 miles of the road was moved (almost the amount of new road he needed to reach his condos), he said he couldn’t afford to pay to move the rest. The state ended up footing the rest of the bill. Page and Bostic were later found guilty of fraud for marketing a proposed North Topsail Beach development that they didn’t actually have the permits to build. In 1994, Bostic went to prison for contempt when a jury ruled he was hiding his assets to avoid paying millions in fines. (At the time, Bostic’s son Marty was mayor of North Topsail Beach.)

All of this sort of belies the fact that many scientists and policy makers think that any road is bad, because it opened up the whole north end of North Topsail to development. Erosion was already severe in that area, and the tip of the island has been known to shift and erode by several feet every years. Waterfront homes and condos have long been protected by piles and piles of sandbags. Plus, the federal government has stated that it wouldn’t provide flood insurance for the tip of Topsail Island, nor would it pay to rebuild it after storms. “In my opinion, that is probably the worst piece of land in North Carolina to develop,” John Wells, the director of the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, told the News and Observer in 1996.

Sandbags at the northern end of Topsail Island after Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 (Picture via the National Weather Service)

But it happened anyway, thanks to local leaders who granted zoning variances, along with the state, which allowed Page and his partners to move the road. In the end, the feds did find a loophole and stepped in to pay to rebuild homes along North Topsail Beach after hurricanes Fran and Bertha in 1996, and the state kept paying millions to rebuild the sections New River Inlet Road that got wiped out.

So what happened to those old, storm-ravaged old sections of road? The Topsail Magazine article says the ocean destroyed them:

When each section of the road was moved, sections of the old road were apparently left to wash away in the water. Long-time Topsail Island resident Bobby Humphrey says that is probably what we are still seeing today in the water at low tide.

The article never definitively says that the ocean turned old sections of road into the black slimy stuff that people are seeing to this day. But a view from this historic coastline map shows that while there’s been massive erosion and shifting along the northern tip of Topsail Island, there hasn’t been a ton of it in the spot right in front of Villa Capriani, which sat right in the path of the old road. For the road bed to be in the water, the island would have had to have shifted way way back. You can see the coastline was furthest out in 1977 (actually 1856, but it’s safe to say there weren’t any asphalt road on the beach back then). The issue seems to be that the beach was really shifting around a lot in the 1970s, and the shoreline retreated back quite a bit by 1984. There doesn’t seem to be any way that a road would have been built that far out, especially one that had to sit behind a lot of sand and a line of protective dunes.

So, how about that peat then?

A lot of folks online cite the Topsail Magazine article as proof that the black stuff in the water is an abandoned road. But town leaders have consistently said that what people are seeing and stepping on is actually peat. That’s what they said back in 2008 when debris started washing up in front of Villa Capriani. And that’s what they told me again this week again when I asked. “Yes, it is peat,” Derian said.

(Back in 2008, town leaders said that despite complaints from beachgoers, it’d cost too much to clean up the peat. “We'd have to bring in some specialized equipment with rakes to get the big chunks, but it's so random, does the effort warrant the benefit? Probably not,” said the town manager at the time.)

Thing is, this isn’t just a Topsail Island phenomenon. In 2020, black chunks started washing up along the Outer Banks. Some people thought it might be oil chunks mixed with seaweed. Others thought it was whale poop.

Nope. That stuff was peat too. The National Park Service said it came from fresh-water marshes and forests that once existed further out hundreds of years ago, when the sea level was much lower. Some of it was covered up by water and occasionally washes ashore. In other spots, like Shackleford Banks, a whole “ghost forest” of peat and stumps was covered up by dunes in the early 1900s. It was exposed again after those dunes shifted.

So on North Topsail, is some of that peat keeping sections of the island from eroding? A report in 2015 posited that theory, but said it was only a theory. There wasn’t any hard evidence saying the peat was holding the island in place.

Is that black slimy stuff a road? Probably not. Is it some dead plant stuff that you can dry out and light on fire (but really shouldn’t)? Probably so. The next time someone asks about it, you can refer them to this article, and then you can go back to talking about the weird missile silos that are spread around North Topsail instead.