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Seas rise and shores expand

24 Nov 2021 | Science Notes

You read that right. Even though alarmists like to torment schoolchildren and gullible grownups with pictures of land being submerged under warming-driven angry seas, now that scientists have had a chance to put the data together, the reality is just the opposite. High tide has been going down relative to the land around the world, on average, since 1984. In a new study just published in the Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (h/t Kenneth Richard of NoTricksZone and yes, there is a journal for everything including ones you don’t know what they are without an online search) scientists merged satellite data spanning 1984 to 2019 with new tools in Google Earth to produce high-resolution measurements of changes in the height of high tide along coastlines around the world. They noted that previous studies found net losses based on surveys of sandy beaches, but these account for only 30% of the total shoreline area. Taking all the coastline types together, the land is expanding, on average, by +0.26 m per year.

As you’d expect in a complex system, some areas are receding while others are expanding. The latter include many river deltas where sediment deposits constantly reshape the land. And humans are changing the shorelines in places, especially by adding land for building purposes. This chart (Fig 9 from the paper) shows the areas of net expansion (green) and contraction (red).

Putting it all together, the authors conclude that “The globally averaged shoreline change rate is about 0.26 m/yr, which is slightly larger than zero and suggests the global coastline is prograding.”

If you find that statement surprising, by which we mean the content rather than the revelation that there’s a verb “prograde” that means the opposite of “retrograde”, so do other scientists working in the field. Even though, as Richards noted, some researchers reported similar findings in 2016 and told the BBC at the time “We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world.” Although that quote somehow slipped into a BBC news item, if it appeared anywhere else we missed it. But there it is.

Bookmark this page because if you pass on the information to your alarmist relatives, they will be as astonished as the scientists themselves. And they may accuse the latter of being deniers and report their findings to Youtube and Facebook to make sure they get banned from any further public discussion.

One comment on “Seas rise and shores expand”

  1. Glad to see someone is printing some sense, whilst sitting on the beach in Florida l had the thought that all the sea creatures and shell types in particular must increase the sand volume enormously over time

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