This spring, Davis will take her eighth-grade students at Beaufort Middle School aboard one of three North Carolina ferries that collect water quality data.
Based at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, CORMP provides oceanographic data in near-real time and information on weather conditions, as well as living marine resources. Data from buoys also provide valuable tools for the National Weather Service in making rip current forecasts.
Although North Carolina cities are not under armed siege, our waters face threats from rising coastal populations and aquifer mining, periodic drought, and contaminated stormwater runoff.
But with celebrity comes scrutiny. The farms are under the public microscope for the wastewater, or effluent, they discharge from their earthen fish ponds into estuarine creeks that empty into the Pamlico Sound.
