THE CALIBOGUE CONVEYOR BELT
When you fly into the Hilton Head Island Airport, you can see it. The flat, olivine waters in Calibogue Sound are stained with serpentine streams of tannish-gray matter. This suspended clay, tiny soil particles eroded from stream banks, farm fields and hillsides in Jasper and eastern Beaufort Counties. Not to be depressing, but in nature, all things eventually go downhill. Or in the case of sediment: downstream.
The flow of tidal, waterborne sediment continues year after year, ton by ton, until it encounters an obstacle. In the verdant salt marsh, tall cord grass intercepts the sediment, which settles, making a pluff-mud bed where the marsh vegetation can sprout and spread on the inshore flanks of Hilton Head Island and neighboring barrier islands. This is the way of the tidelands, and for thousands of years it continued unabated.
