Sullivans Island Home Site

Sullivan’s Island Historic Shorelines

Sullivan’s Island is a unique barrier island - especially in the past 50 years - with acres of accretion. To highlight the massive changes from the 1940’s to present I have started an online map to show the progression. At present all the shorelines were developed from aerial imagery. In the earlier periods I manually ‘heads-up’ digitized the wet-dry line and with more recent data took advantage of the near infra-red band, which does not reflect off water, to do a mainly automated wet-dry shoreline. So, yeah these are not what we would call tidal shorelines (i.e., mean high water) and reflect the timing (when in the monthly tidal cycle it was captured) and wave conditions. In general they are probably going to be a bit further inland from Mean Higher High Water, but only a couple of meters in most places. I will try to add in some very early (pre 1900’s) maps to complete the picture in the coming weeks.