For more than 200 years, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse has guided sailors through the "graveyard of the Atlantic" — the shallow shores of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. But not even the nation’s tallest lighthouse is safe from the merciless grind of the ocean’s waves.
The towering lighthouse has been relocated twice since it first arose in 1803, and will have to be moved again as the sands that make up the 130-mile string of barrier islands — which reach out into the ocean like few others in the world — slowly shift in the surf. It might take 100 years, but scientists say it’s a geologic inevitability.