Will we lose all our beaches underwater as sea levels rise? Won’t it take years for new beaches to form?
In: Earth Science
So, there are plenty of sources of beach or shore erosion that are exacerbated by sea-level rise.
If you’re slowly losing land in a river estuary due to channelization, dredging, loss of silt and so on sea level rise will accelerate that. Large chunks of the gulf coast particularly Louisiana are experiencing this.
Construction of sea walls and other barriers concentrates the energy of wave action and shifts it around so the places that didn’t previously experience flooding or pounding surf now do. This is implicated in significant damage to New York and Long Island during hurricanes. New sea walls means you old flood surveys and models no longer work in dramatic ways which make planning hard.
Low lying barrier islands may no longer provide the shore with as much protection as the did previous thereby increasing erosion in places not previously prone to it. Barrier islands in the Carolinas Texas and Florida are being less effective over time.
It’s not so much that we lose beaches entirely though we do lose some, it’s more that we lose our current shoreline, the built environment that assumes the old boundaries, the habitat along our shores, and a lot of low lying islands including inhabited ones. Places like Kiribati or costal Bangladesh aren’t going to be inhabitable.
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