Waikiki Beach (Artficial, BTW) Losing One Horizontal Foot Per Year To Rising Ocean [View all]

[hatrack]

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A crumbling, century-old stone wall that juts out from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is in imminent danger of collapsing, say scientists. The groin is the sole reason sand remains along this main stretch of Waikiki Beach. Without it, the beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian would likely disappear in a matter of days, said Dolan Eversole, a scientist with the University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant program. It would take several months to a year for the rest of the stretch of sand to erode.

Most visitors may not know it, but Waikiki Beach is almost entirely man-made. It has had erosion problems since the late-1800s when developers began erecting hotels and homes too close to the natural shoreline and building seawalls and other structures that blocked the natural ebb and flow of sand along the beach. By 1950, more than 80 structures, including seawalls, groins, piers and storm drains, were counted along the Waikiki shoreline, according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report.

Efforts to combat the resulting erosion have been haphazard, however, and with sea level rise now claiming about a foot of the beach a year, the threat of losing Waikiki Beach has become more dire.

“Waikiki is arguably as important as a slice of the H-1 and if a part of the H-1 needed maintenance there would be no question that we would go and maintain it, repave it, fill potholes,” said Chip Fletcher, a coastal geologist and associate dean at the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology. “Well, that is what we are doing to Waikiki Beach -- it’s maintenance. If it costs millions of dollars, there is abundant economic justification for that.”

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/09/saving-waikiki-beach-erosion_n_6835424.html