Disappearing Beaches

. .
Disappearing Simple solutions boomerang

beaches
Grim examples Cities like Miami Beach that built right up to the
Role of beaches bluffs above the beach soon noticed that the bluffs
Solving beach were eroding, bringing the ocean a bit too close for
erosion?
Global warming and comfort. (Naming a city after a beach did not mean
sea levels the founders wanted to do the bucket-and-shovel
thing on Ocean Drive.) The city responded by
Update: Flooded
Island
reinforcing the bluffs with sea walls. But the walls
reflected wave energy back to the sea, accelerating
erosion, and depriving the beaches of sand that
normally erodes from bluffs. For both reasons, sea
walls have fallen from favor.
Having said this, we must point out that sea walls are
contentious. Some experts, like Spencer Rogers of
the North Carolina Sea Grant program, say they don't
accelerate erosion, but rather prevent the landward
migration of the beach. Nevertheless, he says, since
the ocean side of the beach keeps moving, "What
beach you do have will disappear" even if a sea wall
is built along an eroding shore.
Landowners plagued by disappearing beaches

quickly realized that building a rock wall
perpendicular to the beach -- a groin -- would gather
sand on the updrift side of the wall. The physics is
simple: The structure slows the longshore currents
that carry sand, and slow-moving water can carry
less suspended sediment -- sand. The result is that
sand is deposited on the updrift side, depriving the
downdrift side of sand.
Groins were heavily built along the New Jersey

coast, but they've also fallen into disfavor. "They
work for the updrift property owner, but it's obvious
that they remove sand from the longshore system,"
says Jim O'Connell, a coastal processes specialist at
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "resulting in
less sand for the downdrift property."
Call it robbing Peter to pay Paul. Call it beggaring

thy neighbor. Call it any cliché you like -- building
groins is highly discouraged in many places. As
O'Connell points out, the coastline is "all one linked
system. If you alter one area, you will be causing an
alteration in another."
Sand flow at the
Indian River inlet in
Delaware was
blocked by these
jetties. Sand is now
piped across the
inlet from the wide
beach to the narrow
one, restoring the
natural flow of sand
and helping reverse
erosion.
Courtesy of Robert
Dalrymple, University
of Delaware. Photo by Faced with a kick to the groin, if we may phrase it
U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers. thusly, beach restorers have resorted to pumping
sand onto beaches, taking the sand from deep waters
or dredging projects. This expensive solution seems
to work -- for a while -- and it's the "method of
choice these days," as Robert Dalrymple, a civil
engineer at the University of Delaware Sea Grant
program, puts it. So-called "beach nourishment"
helped restore Miami Beach, to name one of many
eroded beaches.
Eventually, however, the same forces that denuded

the beach in the first place will remove sand, causing
the problem to return. On the Middle Atlantic coast,
you can figure to pump sand onto a beach about
every five years, Dalrymple says.
Fine tuning
If you're getting the picture that preventing beach
erosion is either feckless or counterproductive, there
is a bright side. Although coastal engineering devices
are not perfect, "most of the solutions you've heard
about will work in the appropriate places,"
Dalrymple says. Take sea walls, regarded just short
of strychnine by many coastal experts. "You hear
lots of bad things about sea walls on the open coast,"
he says, yet they may work "if you have lots of sand
moving past."
Dalrymple says even groins may have a place:

"Robbing of sand will not happen when you fill the
groin fields with sand before you use them. You
don't make sand with these devices," he observes,
but they can protect sand pumped in from elsewhere.
(Groins, incidentally, helped cause the Hatteras

Lighthouse erosion, Rogers says. In the 1970s, the
Navy built two groins just north of the lighthouse, to
protect a building. Predictably, the groins caused
erosion on the downdrift side, and, according to
Rogers, "you'd have to say" it was a classic case of a
groin field robbing sand from the downdrift side.)
Take a break, water!

Another possible solution is building offshore
breakwaters to reduce wave energy before it reaches
the beach. Breakwaters are long heaps of rocks
dumped parallel to the shore to intercept waves, and
6,000 have been built in Japan. "Depending on how
they are used, they will do fine," Dalrymple says,
although he grants visible breakwaters can be
"eyesores."
More intriguing, he says, is a submerged breakwater,

which offer many of the same benefits, without
besmirching the horizon with rock piles. In essence,
a submerged breakwater acts as a coral reef, causing
the waves to break before reaching shore. However,
Dalrymple says the details of how and where to build
them have yet to be worked out, (and we imagine
surfers would despise them).
Finally, Dalrymple points to the sand schlepping

system shown in the photo above. The beach erosion
at the top was caused by jetties built about 30 years
ago to protect a channel used by pleasure boaters.
The jetties interrupted the longshore drift, allowing
the outgoing tidal current from the inlet to funnel
sand to deep waters, where it becomes less useful
than a bikini to a Victorian matron -- it will never be
formed into a sand castle or make coral-colored
asphalt from Turkish Taffy.
As the inlet project demonstrates, the young

discipline of shoreline engineering is an area
requiring lots of ingenuity and fine tuning,
Dalrymple says. And it's just as well -- the beach is
the destination of choice for millions of Americans
each summer, and is worth $800-million per year in
tiny Delaware alone.
Global warming is raising sea levels. That boosts

erosion. How does global warming affect sea
level?
.
There are 1 2 3 4 5 pages in this feature.
Bibliography | Credits | Feedback | Search
©1999, University of Wisconsin, Board of Regents.
https://whyfiles.org/091beach/4.html

Disappearing Beaches

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Disappearing Beaches

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Disappearing Beaches

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

. .

Disappearing Simple solutions boomerang

Landowners plagued by disappearing beaches

Groins were heavily built along the New Jersey

Call it robbing Peter to pay Paul. Call it beggaring

Eventually, however, the same forces that denuded

Dalrymple says even groins may have a place:

(Groins, incidentally, helped cause the Hatteras

Take a break, water!

More intriguing, he says, is a submerged breakwater,

Finally, Dalrymple points to the sand schlepping

As the inlet project demonstrates, the young

Global warming is raising sea levels. That boosts

You might also like