A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands Book

From the North Carolina Outer Banks to New York´s Fire Island, from Iceland to the Netherlands, and Colombia to Vietnam, barrier islands protect much of the world´s coastlines from the ravages of the sea. Although these islands are vastly different in many ways, they also share many common features. Most dramatic among these is their dynamism -barrier islands are in almost constant motion, their advances and retreats offering powerful testimony to the force and beauty of nature. This first-of-its-kind survey of barrier islands around the globe had its genesis in 1993, when geologist Orrin Pilkey met artist Mary Edna Fraser at Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina. They soon realized they shared a passion for the barriers, one heightened by the many threats the islands face from development and global warming. These endangered and irreplaceable jewels, Pilkey and Fraser determined, needed to be better understood, and, as important, to be seen in a new way, if they were to be saved. Every bit as dynamic as the islands they depict, Fraser´s spectacular original batik artwork (cloth colored by hand using a modern variation of an ancient dyeing technique) combines with Pilkey´s engaging and informative style to create a treasure that is both beautiful and rigorously scientific. A Celebration of the World´s Barrier Islands is one part stunning coffee table book, and one part state-of-the-art popular science, and it will take readers on a long-distance journey from pole to pole and hemisphere to hemisphere that is altogether original.Read More