Coastal Complexity and Predictions of Change

Abstract

Most people tend to think of coasts as material “things”. What you see when you look at a coast at any instant in time may be a beach composed of sand or a coastal wetland consisting of vegetation, mud and crabs and perhaps some methane or hydrogen sulfide gas. But in previous times it may have been very different and it probably will be different in the future. In reality, coasts are not “things” but processes; they are not static but are constantly becoming something new. This has always been the natural way with coasts. The ever-changing coastal process involves the interplay of solid material (e.g., sand and mud), chemistry (e.g., the pH of the Earth’s oceans), forces, energy fluxes and transfers (e.g., physical, chemical, biological, and solar), biological activity and ecological evolution, and, now, profound human interaction. We may reasonably expect coastal change to be accelerated in response to the climate changes that are now underway in the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch in which human activities are causing profound and enduring modifications to the earth’s surface.

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.

—Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Native American people, c. 1855