EPA Scientist Says East Coast Beaches Threatened by Sea Level, But Nobody’s Listening

[n2doc]

By Josh Harkinson April 27, 2010 | 2:26 pm | Categories: Earth Science, Environment


For most of the 20th century, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, was known for its boardwalk, amusement park and wide, sandy beaches, popular with daytrippers from Washington, D.C. “The bathing beach has a frontage of three miles,” boasted a tourist brochure from about 1900, “and is equal, if not superior, to any beach on the Atlantic Coast.”

Today, on a cloudless spring afternoon, the resort town’s sweeping view of Chesapeake Bay is no less stunning. But there’s no longer any beach in Chesapeake Beach. Where there once was sand, water now laps against a seven-foot-high wall of boulders protecting a strip of pricey homes marked with “No Trespassing” signs.

Surveying the armored shoreline, Jim Titus explains how the natural sinking of the shoreline and slow but steady sea-level rise, mostly due to climate change, have driven the bay’s water more than a foot higher over the past century. Reinforcing the eroding shore with a sea wall held the water back, but it also choked off the natural supply of sand that had replenished the beach. What sand remained gradually sank beneath the rising water.

Titus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s resident expert on sea-level rise, first happened upon Maryland’s disappearing beaches 15 years ago while looking for a place to windsurf. “Having the name beach,” he discovered, “is not a very good predictor of having a beach.” Since then, he’s kept an eye out for other beach towns that have lost their namesakes—Maryland’s Masons Beach and Tolchester Beach, North Carolina’s Pamlico Beach, and many more. (See a map of Maryland’s phantom beach towns here.)



http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/climate-desk-sea-level/

[fascisthunter]

1. unfortunately, buyers keep buying, developers keep developing

once again, the all too common lesson here is greed fucks everything up. Greed is NOT GOOD. Repeat after me, Greed is not Good. Thank you for your time.

[ensho]

2. true - nobody is listening

I grew up on and around the Bay

long ago when the Bay was beautiful and full of life.

those days are gone forever

[FarCenter]

3. It is not so much sea level rise as the attempt to keep barrier islands from moving

Once people build on a barrier island, they think that it should stay put. So they build jetties, sea walls, etc., to keep the beach where it is.

This stops the natural inward migration of the barrier island, and after a time will cause the barrier island to become narrower and narrower.

Until there is a major hurricane to rearrange things.

[callous taoboy]

5. "It is not so much sea level rise..."

Got a link backed by science that "centers" the EPA's conclusion?

[conscious evolution]

7. I bet FC could find one if he looked

What FC says about coastal barrier Islands is very true.Mother nature is constantly shifting the sands of an island from one end to the other by the force of wind and tidal movement of water.Anyone who has spent a lot of time on such an island and its surrounding waters can attest to the phenomena.
When I lived on Hilton Head Island in the eighties,the beach and dunes on the south end of the island grew a couple of hundred yards in a five year period.During the same time the beaches on the north end and the center of the island grew smaller.The areas that lost the most beach were areas that had riprap protection.,btw
When hurricane Hugo hit in the late eighties,the beach that had grown out in front of my place was washed away in a single night.However,there was a new sandbar a mile or so offshore that wasn't there before.Within a year,that sandbar had been washed away.
Never,ever misunderestimate the power of wind and flowing water to cause geological change.It happens constantly all over the globe.
While I'm sure that rising waters have played a part in the Cheasepeakes degredation I would also bet that good old erosion,coupled with destruction of marshland and dunes by humans,has played a big part in disappearing beaches along the east coast.

[Forkboy]

4. K&R

:kick:

[yowzayowzayowza]

6. The Texas Open Beaches Act is indeed a good thing.

Redstate sanity, whoda thunkit.