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California: it’s not all fun in the sun as beaches disappear

Posted by: Maven on July 10, 2009 at 7:00 am

From OhMyGov.com:

Just like there’s no such thing as a cure-all pill with no side effects, California is having trouble slowing the erosion of its towering cliffs without sacrificing meters of its beach space annually, although researchers are having trouble determining the exact degree of relationship between the two.

According to an article called “Rates and trends of coastal change in California and the regional behavior of the beach and cliff system” published in the Journal of Coastal Research, the man-made structures that are meant to protect the cliffs and bluffs along the Californian coast are deflecting waves back onto the sand and increasing erosion rates. The lesson: humans can’t engineer our way out of everything.

The research showed that two-thirds of the state’s beaches are being eroded at a much faster pace.

Cheryl Hapke, a coastal geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center in Massachusetts, listed harbors, ports, breakwaters, jetties and groins — the structure not the body part — as examples of man-made structures that “actually shut off the river of sand that naturally wants to move down the coast.”This river of sand would normally replenish the beaches with sand by moving sand from the top down to lower levels of the beach. But with the storm surge walls and other structures put in place to break the force of the waves, nature is being disrupted and the sand is unable to be pulled back down to the lower beach. As a result, the beaches are disappearing at an alarming rate.

Read more from Ohmygov.com by clicking here.

July 10, 2009 · Filed Under Oceans & Beaches

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