skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Beach at Cancun, Mexico. Photo courtesy: Cancun beach photo via Shutterstock
Whether they're playgrounds for the rich and famous or havens for retirees, the world's best beach resorts may disappear despite efforts to protect them against sea level rise.
That's the prediction of coastal expert Andrew Cooper, a professor at the University of Ulster in Ireland, who said that the usual way of replenishing a beach, by adding sand to it, will not keep up with the sea's rapid rise.
"A key attractor in most of the world's examples of coastal resort cities has been the presence of an adjacent beach," Cooper said in a statement. "Some well-known examples are Benidorm, Torremolinos (Spain); Cannes (France); West Palm Beach, Fla.; Atlantic City, N.J, Myrtle Beach, S.C., Virginia Beach, Va.; Cancun (Mexico); and the most rapidly developed of all coastal resort cities, Dubai (United Arab Emirates). In all of these resorts the challenge is to preserve the real estate behind the beach and still save the beaches, which are being pushed landwards by rising sea level."
Erosion at Palm Beach on Australia's Gold Coast. Photo courtesy: University of Ulster
Cooper said most resorts combat ongoing sea level rise with beach nourishment — adding sand to replace that eroded by the encroaching ocean. But holding the world's best beaches stationary during an expected 3-foot (1 meter) sea level rise in the next 100 years would require massive inputs of sand, Cooper said.
"Beach resort cities are mostly artificial creations on the shoreline that rely on beach nourishment to sustain them and on their reputation for a clean and safe environment. To maintain this during rapid sea level rise will be near impossible," he said.
Erecting protective concrete walls won't give the beaches room to move inland and will ultimately lead to beaches getting squeezed out as sea level rises, he said. When the rising water reaches a protective wall between the beach and the developed land behind it, the beach is drowned.
"There are a lot of issues with beach nourishment — not least the cost — but beach nourishment would not be needed if developments were properly planned in the first place, to give beaches room to move," Cooper said.
Based on a recent study of Australia's Gold Coast, the problem involves a lack of planning and poor short-term fixes, Cooper said. Uncertainty regarding how high the sea will rise compounds the problem, as do climate change skeptics and the lack of political will to plan for future climate scenarios, he said.
The study appears in the August 2012 issue of the journal Ocean & Coastal Management.
Photo courtesy: US Fish and Wildlife Service
New research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows that global sea level rise is happening 60% faster than IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) projections, even though temperatures are rising much as expected.
Potsdam's Stefan Rahmstorf:It contrast to the physics of global warming itself, sea level rise is much more complex. To improve future projections it is very important to keep track of how well past projections match observational data. The new findings highlight that the IPCC is far from being alarmist, and in fact in some cases rather underestimates possible risks.
So how fast are sea levels actually rising?
This latest research, based off satellite data so as to get more accurate readings and greater global coverage, shows that sea levels are rising on average 3.2mm each year—and not because of any temporary event like ice discharges from the ice sheets of Greenland or Antarctica, or because of internal variability in the climate system.
The IPCC has projected that sea level rise is happening at the rate of 2mm per year.
The Greenland ice sheet on July 8, left, and four days later on the right. An estimated 97% of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. Photo courtesy: Nasa
The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.
The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.
In a statement posted on Nasa's website on Tuesday, scientists admitted the satellite data was so striking they thought at first there had to be a mistake.
"This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?" Son Nghiem of Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena said in the release.
He consulted with several colleagues, who confirmed his findings. Dorothy Hall, who studies the surface temperature of Greenland at Nasa's space flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, confirmed that the area experienced unusually high temperatures in mid-July, and that there was widespread melting over the surface of the ice sheet.
Climatologists Thomas Mote, at the University of Georgia, and Marco Tedesco, of the City University of New York, also confirmed the melt recorded by the satellites.
However, scientists were still coming to grips with the shocking images on Tuesday. "I think it's fair to say that this is unprecedented," Jay Zwally, a glaciologist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, told the Guardian.
The set of images released by Nasa on Tuesday show a rapid thaw between July 8-12, 2012. Within that four-day period, measurements from three satellites showed a swift expansion of the area of melting ice, from about 40% of the ice sheet surface to 97%.
Zwally, who has made almost yearly trips to the Greenland ice sheet for more than three decades, said he had never seen such a rapid melt.
About half of Greenland's surface ice sheet melts during a typical summer, but Zwally said he and other scientists had been recording an acceleration of that melting process over the last few decades. This year his team had to rebuild their camp, at Swiss Station, when the snow and ice supports melted.
He said he was most surprised to see indications in the images of melting even around the area of Summit Station, which is about two miles above sea level.
It was the second unusual event in Greenland in a matter of days, after an iceberg the size of Manhattan broke off from the Petermann Glacier. But the rapid melt was viewed as more serious.
"If you look at the 8 July image that might be the maximum extent of warming you would see in the summer," Zwally noted. "There have been periods when melting might have occurred at higher elevations briefly – maybe for a day or so – but to have it cover the whole of Greenland like this is unknown, certainly in the time of satellite records."
Lora Koenig, another Goddard glaciologist, told Nasa similar rapid melting occurs about every 150 years. But she warned there were wide-ranging potential implications from this year's thaw.
"If we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome." she told Nasa.
The most immediate consequences are sea level rise and a further warming of the Arctic. In the centre of Greenland, the ice remains up to 3,000 metres deep. On the edges, however, the ice is much, much thinner and has been melting into the sea.
The melting ice sheet is a significant factor in sea level rise. Scientists attribute about one-fifth of the annual sea level rise, which is about 3mm every year, to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
In this instance of this month's extreme melting, Mote said there was evidence of a heat dome over Greenland: or an unusually strong ridge of warm air.
The dome is believed to have moved over Greenland on 8 July, lingering until 16 July.
New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged. Photo courtesy: Das/AP
The argument had been raging for nearly 30 years with no end in sight; but, the argument is over now. Mother Nature has done for the combatants what they refused to do for themselves. For nearly three decades, India and Bangladesh have argued over ownership and control of a tiny rock island located in the Bay of Bengal.
Now, thanks to global warming and rising sea levels, the island has become submerged. There is nothing left to fight over. New Moore Island in the Sunderdans is no longer. Its disappearance has been confirmed by both satellite imagery and sea patrols. Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta, says: "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming.”
Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal.
Hazra goes on to point out that until 2000, the rise in sea levels remained reasonably constant at about 3 mm (0.12") a year; but, over the past decade they have risen approximately 5 mm (0.2") annually. This rise in the sea level has already caused another nearby island, Lohachara, to become submerged. Lohachara sunk in 1996 forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland. Today almost half the land of Ghoramara island is underwater; while at least 10 other islands in the area are at risk as well.
"We will have ever larger numbers of people displaced from the Sunderbans as more island areas come under water," Hazra said.
Bangladesh is a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people and one of the countries most-affected by global warming. Already there is shifting of land masses in the deltas forcing the approximately 20 million people who live there to constantly be physically one step ahead of the erosion. If the sea levels continue to rise just 1 m (3.3') by 2050 as projected by some climate models, officials estimate 18% of Bangladesh's coastal area will be underwater and these 20 million people will be displaced.
India and Bangladesh both claimed the never-developed, totally uninhabited New Moore Island which is about 3.5 km (2 mi) long and 3 km (1.5 mi) wide. In a war where each country refused to back down, Bangladesh referred to New Moore island as South Talpatti and India sent paramilitary soldiers to its rocky shores in 1981 to plant its national flag.
The demarcation of the maritime boundary — and who controls the remaining islands — remains an open issue between the two South Asian neighbors.
Via Yahoo! News
One of the first victims of our changing climate is Bangladesh. This low-lying delta is slowly sinking under the weight of the rising seas. There are already great areas of land in the coastal belt that are now under water. If the current climate changes are not reversed soon, much of Bangladesh could be swallowed up by the Bay of Bengal.
There are some very grim possibilities in Bangladesh’s future if the climate changes carry on abated. Within the next 50 years, 17% of Bangladesh’s landmass is certain to be lost to the bay leaving 30 million people homeless and looking for new places to live in a country that is already desperately overcrowded.
For those who live further inland, cyclones and floods will increase in frequency and intensity. Changes in temperature will mean intense torrents of rain followed contrastingly by periods of drought. It is possible that the entire monsoon cycle will collapse.
The Jamuna river is often called the “Jamuna braid”. It is called a “braid” because the river splits in estuaries and channels, joins together again repeatedly and forms a constantly changing landscape of land and water. The islands made of river silt (called chars) are strange-land formations that live in the regions between land and water. The Jamuna braid is home to most of Bangladesh’s chars. The people who live on the chars do so because with a population of 180 million people, every micro-inch of land must be utilized.
These chars have a lifespan of nine years before they are reclaimed by the water. Char dwellers are repeated victims of flooding and river erosion; but, amazingly have found a way to live in this landscape that is literally “here today and gone tomorrow”.
Chars are uninhabitable until they are few years old. Char dwellers tell the age of the islands by the wild plants that have become established on them. There are usually only enough chars surfaced and habitable for the people to have a home made from what they can collect: tin, cardboard, old pieces of wood. They have no place in which to plant crops so the men usually work as weavers or day labourers. They are the “hard-core poor”. They own absolutely nothing; and, have to deal repeatedly with the char disappearing back into the water before they have had a chance to evacuate it.
Many of you are asking, “This is tragic; but, Bangladesh is a long way from me. Why should I be concerned?” True, the effects that are ravishing Bangladesh may not be obviously visible to people in North America, Europe or other countries far from this poor third-world one; but, we must learn from what is happening or we shall be doomed to repeat it.
The world’s oceans are rising. The rise so far has been quite minimal compared to what could happen if both the polar ice caps melted and flooded our planet. Unfortunately for Bangladesh even though the water rising is minimal so far; they are so close to sea level that they have literally lost ground to the ocean. Bangladesh is simply not as large as it used to be. As the waters continue to rise, more coastal areas will be in danger. The United Kingdom is presently facing a loss of some of its coastal land and villages (more on that in another blog).
The water rises, the climate changes; the water rises more, the climate changes more; and so on and so on and so on. It is only a matter of time before everyone, everywhere is affected by this. We can’t all become char dwellers.
Keep encouraging your elected officials to make changes and make them now. Keep reducing your carbon footprint and encourage others to do the same. United, we can make a difference.
Posts
