shorelines

New York is raising its shoreline

January 18, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 flooded 17% of New York City and caused $19 billion in damage. In its aftermath, plans emerged to create floodwalls, raised elevations, high-capacity drainage, and other infrastructure to protect the city from future Sandy-like events.

Like all large infrastructure projects in densely populated places, the remaking of New York’s shoreline has only moved along in fits and starts. But there has been significant progress.

The East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project is the largest urban resiliency project currently underway in the United States. The first piece of it – the Asser Levy renovation – was completed in 2022. Over the next three years, the $1.8 billion ESCR will reshape two-and-a-half miles of Lower Manhattan’s shoreline. The ESCR is just one part of a much larger $2.7 billion initiative called the BIG U, which is a series of contiguous flood resilience projects that will create 5.5 miles of new park space specifically designed to protect over 60,000 residents and billions of dollars in real estate against sea level rise and storm surges.

In a time of rising seas and increasingly powerful storms, flood-prone coastal U.S. cities – including Boston, Norfolk, Charleston, Miami, and San Francisco – are moving toward embracing the long-held Dutch concept of “living with water”, which emphasizes infrastructure that can both repel and absorb water while also providing recreational and open space.

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After a Decade of Planning, New York City Is Raising Its Shoreline

Photo, posted November 1, 2012, courtesy of Rachel via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

More Offshore Wind Proposed For New Jersey | Earth Wise

September 13, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There have been three offshore wind projects previously approved by utility regulators in New Jersey. New Jersey is vying to become an East Coast leader in the fast-growing offshore wind industry and now developers have proposed four new projects off the New Jersey Shore.

Two of the projects would be located far out to sea where they would not be visible at all from the shore. One of them, called Community Offshore Wind, would be built 37 miles offshore from Long Beach Island. It aims to generate enough electricity to power 500,000 homes.

A second project, called Leading Light Wind, would be located 40 miles off Long Beach Island and would consist of up to 100 turbines that would generate enough electricity to power 1 million homes.

The two companies that are building the already-approved Atlantic Shores Wind Farm have submitted a bid for a new project located 10 to 20 miles offshore. In addition, a fourth application to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities has also been submitted, but there is yet no public information about it.

Existing offshore projects have drawn intense opposition from homeowners in part because they are close enough to the Atlantic City and Ocean City shorelines to be seen by beachgoers, albeit as tiny objects on the horizon. The new proposed projects located far offshore would not have this problem.

The new projects can take advantage of existing federal tax credits, but the bidders say they will not seek the tax breaks from New Jersey that the earlier project received as they have also been the subject of legal challenges by opponents of offshore wind.

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4 new offshore wind power projects proposed for New Jersey Shore; 2 would be far out to sea

Photo, posted March 25, 2016, courtesy of TEIA via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Trouble For The Outer Banks | Earth Wise

August 9, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The Outer Banks are a series of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina that separate the Atlantic Ocean from the mainland. They are a very popular tourist destination featuring open-sea beaches, state parks, shipwreck diving sites, and historic locations such as Roanoke Island, the site of England’s first settlement in the New World. There is also Kitty Hawk, the site of the Wright Brothers’ first flights.

The ribbon of islands is nearly 200 miles long. Some of them are low and narrow and are only a few feet above sea level. Many are especially vulnerable to Nor’easters in the winter and hurricanes in the summer. The collision of warm Gulf Stream waters and the colder Labrador current helps to create dangerous shoals and some of the largest waves on the East Coast.

Over the years, developers have added billions of dollars’ worth of real estate to the Outer Banks. Rising sea levels and increasingly frequent storms threaten the barrier islands of the Outer Banks. Beach-front cottages have tumbled into the ocean for as long as people have built them in the Outer Banks but now they are falling at a greater rate and more and more are in danger.

The Department of Transportation has spent nearly $100 million dollars to keep NC12, the highway connecting the string of islands, open to traffic. Three new bridges built to traverse inlets opened by storms and bypassing rapidly eroding shorelines raised the cost by another half a billion dollars.

There are many other measures such as pumping sand into eroded areas going on in the Outer Banks, but ultimately, all of the measures may not be enough to deal with rising sea levels and more powerful storms.

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Shifting Sands: Carolina’s Outer Banks Face a Precarious Future

Photo, posted August 31, 2011, courtesy of NCDOT Communications via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Making Use Of Invasive Seaweed | Earth Wise

June 26, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In recent years, millions of tons of brown Sargassum seaweed have formed gigantic blooms stretching all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. The seaweed has become a problem for shorelines in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the east coast of Florida. The massive increase in seaweed populations is related to changes in ocean chemistry resulting from nutrients from fertilizer use entering the water as well as from changes to the climate affecting ocean currents and temperatures. The seaweed is harming the tourism industry as well as fisheries and ocean ecosystems.

Cleaning up the seaweed that washes ashore is labor-intensive and therefore expensive. A research team led by two British universities has developed a cheap and simple way to pre-process seaweed to facilitate making it into bulk chemicals and biofuels. With the new process, cleaning up the seaweed can be both economically and environmentally viable.

Previous techniques for processing seaweed generally required removing it from the saltwater, washing it in fresh water, and drying it – all of which add significant costs. The new technique makes use of catalysts to release sugars from untreated seaweed that feed a yeast to produce a palm oil substitute. At the same time, the process creates heat and pressure, turning the residual materials into a bio-oil that can be processed further into fuels, and a high-quality, low-cost fertilizer.

Apart from getting economic value out of the seaweed that is collected, any plastic collected alongside the seaweed can be converted to useful materials as well.

It appears that the seaweed scourge is here to stay, so finding an economically viable way to deal with it is a welcome development.

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Solve invasive seaweed problem by turning it into biofuels and fertilisers

Photo, posted August 10, 2015, courtesy of Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Conservation In Vermont | Earth Wise

May 6, 2020 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In recent times, Vermont and neighboring states have been losing forest land to development at a rate of almost 1,500 acres per year. With forest fragmentation gaining ground across New England, conserving land for future generations of people, wildlife, and plants has become both increasingly important and increasingly difficult.

According to a new study published by researchers at the University of Vermont, the state has already protected a third of the highest priority targeted lands needed to protect and connect valuable wildlife habitats and corridors. The protected lands amount to 1.3 million acres.

Most of the currently conserved lands are forested. However, there are high-priority targeted surface water and riparian areas – ponds, rivers, shorelines, and wetlands – and not nearly enough of these have been protected. (Many animals require zones along waterways in which to travel between the habitats they need to survive).

The state of Vermont and a number of partners have laid out a comprehensive and thoughtful vision that would ensure that Vermont remains a good place for all forms of life in the future. The new study provides a crucial benchmark of current levels of forest protection to help prioritize future conservation actions.

Three groups dominate in responsibility for the state’s protected lands: the federal government, the state government, and private non-profit organizations. (Each of these account for roughly a third of existing protected lands).

Going forward, Vermont’s nonprofits will play an increasingly important role in land conservation, especially in continuing to protect those areas that are rich with species diversity. Nonprofits are engaging more and more deeply in restoring wetlands that were previously degraded, planting new forests along river shores, and protecting unique natural communities while also protecting working forests and farmland.

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Vermont Has Conserved One Third of the Land Needed for an Ecologically Functional Future

Photo, posted June 15, 2014, courtesy of Wesley Carr via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

A Giant Seaweed Bloom

August 19, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Scientists using data from NASA satellites have discovered and documented the largest bloom of seaweed in the world, stretching all the way from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. The gigantic macroalgae bloom has been dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.

The brown seaweed floats in surface water and in recent years has become a problem to shorelines lining the tropical Atlantic, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and east coast of Florida. The stuff carpets popular beach destinations and crowded coastal waters. In 2018, more than 20 million tons of it floated on the ocean surface.

Scientists have been studying the Sargassum algae using satellites since 2006, but the major blooms have only started appearing since 2011. They have occurred every year between 2011 and 2018 except for 2013. Before 2011, most of the free-floating Sargassum in the ocean was primarily found in patches around the Gulf of Mexico and the Sargasso Sea located on the western edge of the central Atlantic Ocean.

Sargassum provides habitat for turtles, crabs, fish and birds, and produces oxygen via photosynthesis. However, too much of it can crowd out many marine species.

According to researchers, the ocean’s chemistry must have changed in order for the bloom to get so out of hand. The factors involved include a large seed population left over from a previous bloom, nutrient input from West Africa, and nutrient input from the Amazon River. The increase in nutrients may be a result of deforestation and fertilizer use.

Climate-change effects on precipitation and ocean currents ultimately do play a role in this, but increased ocean temperatures do not. Unfortunately, these giant seaweed blooms are probably here to stay.

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NASA Satellites Find Biggest Seaweed Bloom in the World

Photo courtesy of NASA.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Protecting Vulnerable Shorelines

May 21, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Global climate change is having noticeable effects on the environment. For example, glaciers are shrinking. Plant and animal ranges are shifting and populations decreasing. And droughts, floods, and wildfires are becoming more frequent and more intense. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time.

Our coastal shorelines, which are already stressed by human activity, pollution, storms, and invasive species, are one of many areas expected to be further threatened by climate change. Sea level rise and more intense and frequent storms are expected to erode and inundate coastal ecosystems and eliminate wetlands. Ocean acidification is also projected to disrupt marine environments.

But according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seagrasses could play a key role in protecting these vulnerable shorelines from this onslaught. The MIT research team demonstrated how the ubiquitous marine plants dissipate wave energy and help protect against erosion, which could help mitigate damage from rising seas.

Using mathematical modelling and experiments, the MIT researchers were able to quantify for the first time how large and dense a continuous meadow of seagrass must be in order to provide adequate damping of waves in a given setting. They also found that seagrasses offer significant environmental benefits, including preventing beach erosion, protecting seawalls and coastal structures, improving water quality, and sequestering carbon.

Submerged aquatic vegetation, including seagrasses, provides an ecosystem service exceeding $4 trillion annually. Hopefully these findings can help provide useful guidance for seagrass restoration efforts.

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Seagrass’ strong potential for curbing erosion

The Effects of Climate Change

Photo, posted October 13, 2010, courtesy of the NOAA Photo Library via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Saving Beaches With Seagrass

February 22, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Almost a quarter of the Gross Domestic Product of places around the Caribbean Sea is earned from tourism. Preserving the beaches in the region is an economic imperative. With increasing coastal development, the natural flow of water and sand is disrupted, natural ecosystems are damaged, and many tropical beaches simply disappear into the sea.

With such high stakes, expensive coastal engineering efforts such as repeated replenishing of sand and the construction of concrete protective walls are common strategies. Rising sea levels and increasingly powerful storms only increase the threat to tropical beaches.

Researchers from The Netherlands and Mexico recently published a study in the journal BioScience on the effectiveness of seagrass in holding onto sand and sediment along shorelines.

Seagrasses are so-named because most species have long green, grass-like leaves. They are often confused with seaweeds but are actually more closely related to flowering plants seen on land. Seagrasses have roots, stems and leaves, and produce flowers and seeds. Seagrasses can form dense underwater meadows and are one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Seagrasses provide shelter and food to an incredibly diverse community of animals, from tiny invertebrates to large fish, crabs, turtles, marine mammals and birds.

The researchers performed measurements of the ability of seagrass along Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula coastline to keep sand in place and prevent erosion. They found that the amount of erosion was strongly linked to the amount of vegetation. Quite often, seagrass beds have been regarded as a nuisance, rather than a valuable asset for preserving valuable coastlines. The study opens opportunities for developing new tropical beach protection schemes in which ecology is integrated into engineering solutions.

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Seagrass Saves Beaches and Money

Photo, posted October 13, 2010, courtesy of NOAA via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.