Say Goodbye To Beaches: Rising Seas Are Set To Erode The World's Coastlines [View all]
Truthdig, Tim Radford, Climate News Network, March 19, 2020.
Right now, around a third of the world’s coastline is made up of sandy beaches and dunes which slope gently and softly to the sea. By the end of the century, these could make up only one-sixth of the frontier between land and ocean. Sea level rise driven by global heating could sweep half of them away.
Beaches are nature’s buffers between eroding land and tempestuous sea: they protect the coast, they provide a unique habitat for wildlife, and they have become powerful socio-economic resources.
But the paradise for surfers around sunlit Australia is almost certain to be diminished in the coming climate crisis as the waves lap ever higher, storm surges sweep away vast volumes of sand, and seas flood low-lying coasts. And – according to new European research in the journal Nature Climate Change – what is true for Australia is true for much of the rest of the world.
How much beach is lost will depend on how nations respond to the challenge of climate change. But in the worst-case scenario, Australia and Canada could each say goodbye to nearly 15,000 kilometers of sandy shore by 2100. Chile could lose more than 6,000 km, Mexico, China and the US more than 5,000 km, Russia more than 4,000 km and Argentina more than 3,000 km.
“Much of the world’s coast is already eroding, which could get worse with sea level rise”
And that’s the outlook for countries with vast coastlines. Some could fare even worse. Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia in West Africa, for instance, could lose 60% of their beaches.
The European scientists looked at more than 30 years of satellite data on coastal change – from 1984 to 2015 – and 82 years of climate and sea level predictions from a range of climate models. They also simulated 100 million storm events...
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