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Should manmade structures be used to stabilize the coastline?

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(Beiser)

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Stronger regulations can prevent a lot of this damage, and do in most developed countries. But there's a downside. Sand is tremendously heavy, which makes it expensive to transport. If you forbid sand mining in your backyard - as many American communities are trying to do - then it has to be trucked in from somewhere else. That drives up the price. Concrete is relatively cheap; if the cost of making a new building or road were to double, it could hit the economy hard.

Not to mention the extra truck traffic and pollution. California state officials estimated that if the average hauling distance for sand and gravel increased to 50 miles from 25 miles, trucks would burn through nearly 50 million more gallons of diesel fuel every year.

We can make more sand, but crushing rock or pulverizing concrete is costly, and the resulting sand is ill suited for many applications. We can use alternative substances for some purposes, but what other substance can we possibly find 40 billion tons of, every year?

The fishing villages in the mangrove-rich estuaries of Cambodia's Koh Kong province might be the canaries in the global sand mine. For years, villagers have complained that rampant sand mining is wiping out the crabs and fish that provide their living. Locals told me on a recent visit that families have had to send members to work in Phnom Penh garment factories, or have simply moved away. The dredging also threatens endangered native dolphins, turtles and otters.

Last year, members of Mother Nature, an environmental group led by Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson and others, began a campaign to rein in the mining, organizing villagers to blockade and board the dredging ships. The government, which had expelled Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson a few months earlier for blocking road access to government officials trying to reach a hydropower dam in the province, arrested three of the activists, charging them with threatening to damage dredging boats, an offense that could mean two years in prison (Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson was charged in absentia as their accomplice a few months later).

Mr. Gonzalez-Davidson, who lives in Barcelona, is petitioning to be allowed back to attend his own trial. Meanwhile, the three jailed Cambodians have been denied bail for the past 10 months. Their trial has finally been scheduled for the end of June.

There's an urgent question of justice for them. For the rest of us, there's a profound lesson. Hardly anyone thinks about sand, where it comes from or what we do to get it. But a world of seven billion people, more and more of whom want apartments to live in and offices to work in and malls to shop in, can't afford that luxury anymore.

It once seemed as if the planet had such boundless supplies of oil, water, trees and land that we didn't need to worry about them. But of course, we're learning the hard way that none of those things are infinite, and the price we've paid so far for using them is going up fast. We're having to conserve, reuse, find alternatives for and generally get smarter about how we use those natural resources. That's how we need to start thinking about sand.

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Stronger regulations can prevent a lot of this damage, and do in most developed countries. But there's a downside. Sand is tremendously heavy, which makes it expensive to transport. If you forbid sand mining in your backyard - as many American communities are trying to do - then it has to be trucked in from somewhere else.

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(Gillaspy)

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Coastal Erosion

Imagine you were living in your dream home, somewhere along the coast. This beautiful home overlooks the ocean, and every morning you can sit out on your deck and watch the ocean waves lap up onto the sand. When you bought the home years ago, you imagined that this would be your home for the rest of your life. However, as the years have gone by, you have been noticing that the beach has become smaller and the waves from the ocean are getting closer and closer to your home with every passing year.

This wearing away of coastal land and beaches is referred to as coastal erosion. It is a concern for many coastal communities and owners of beachfront properties. In this lesson, you will learn how hard stabilization structures, such as groins, breakwaters and seawalls are used to protect beachfront properties and the coast from erosion.

Hard Stabilization

Beaches and shorelines are dynamic places that are in a constant state of change due to forces that act upon them, such as waves and currents. Coastal erosion is constantly happening because waves are constantly hitting the beach and shoreline structures. However, this process can be accelerated by storms, which produce large waves that crash onto shore with a lot of energy. Erosion of beaches and shorelines can negatively impact the lives of people living along the coast and cause costly damage to their properties.

Therefore, coastal communities are often willing to invest in hard stabilization, which is the use of man-made protective structures to control erosion. While hard stabilization structures help slow erosion caused by waves, they also prevent the shifting of sand along the beach. Sand and sediment are constantly moving parallel to the shoreline due to the force of waves that strike the shore at an angle. Waves rarely strike the shore straight on. Instead, we see a phenomenon called wave refraction, in which the waves bend as they travel toward the shallow waters of the shore.

These oblique waves create the longshore drift, which is the process by which sand and sediment are transported along the coast. The longshore drift can be responsible for the loss of beach sand from an area, and you can imagine that people who own homes, restaurants or hotels along that stretch of beach suffer from this loss. They do not want to watch the beach in front of their property deteriorate as sand is washed down the coast.

Groins

Therefore, coastal communities build structures to try to contain the sand. A groin is a hard stabilization structure built at a right angle to the shore to maintain or widen beaches. A groin is built to trap sand that is moving down the coast due to the natural action of waves and currents. Groins may be built in groups in order to protect long stretches of beach. These hard structures, stretching from the beach and out into the water, confine sand to a designated area.

However, they do not stop waves. Therefore, sand can still move between the groins. This results in sand accumulating on the upstream side of the groin and eroding from the downstream side. This can create new problems because it modifies the shape of the beach and can negatively affect beaches down the coast.

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using hard stabilization on shorelines - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Using Hard Stabilization on Shorelines - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Imagine you were living in your dream home, somewhere along the coast. This beautiful home overlooks the ocean, and every morning you can sit out on your deck and watch the ocean waves lap up onto the sand. When you bought the home years ago, you imagined that this would be your home for the rest of your life.

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(Jack)

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