Word: sanding
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...past few decades, as property owners began to demand that coastal areas stay put -- by buying up seaside property and erecting multimillion- dollar beachfront houses, condominiums, hotels and resorts on the shifting sand -- the natural process of erosion began to matter to growing numbers of Americans. Along with the roads, parking lots, airfields and commercial interests that serve them, development projects not only put more people and property in harm's way but also unwittingly accelerated the damage to U.S. coastal areas...
...West Coast, houses perched atop cliffs create new runoff patterns for rainfall and irrigation; combined with seepage from septic systems, the drainage weakens the land itself. On the East and Gulf coasts, the major problem is destruction of beaches and sand dunes that normally check the ocean's force. Of particular concern are the 295 barrier islands -- strips of sand dune, marsh and sometimes forest -- that protect most of the U.S. coast from Maine to Texas. Not surprisingly, they are considered prime development spots: Atlantic City, N.J., Virginia Beach, Va., and Hilton Head, S.C., among others, were all built...
...Sand dunes can also be destroyed in subtler ways. For a dune to form in the first place, sand must somehow be trapped, much as a snow fence traps drifting snow. That something is dune grass. After the dunes form, the roots anchor the sand in place. "Dune grass is pretty hardy stuff," explains Stephen Leatherman, a University of Maryland coastal-erosion expert. "It can take salt spray and high winds. But it just never evolved to take heavy pedestrian traffic or dune buggies." Since the plants depend on chlorophyll in their green leafy parts to convert sunlight into food...
...from rivers, bays and inlets over the past 5,000 to 8,000 years. As the sediments gradually compress under their own weight, the surface sinks lower. On the Gulf Coast, a process called subsidence, caused in part by the extraction of groundwater and petroleum from subterranean layers of sand and clay, has forced the land, already virtually at sea level, to drop 3 ft. a century. In all, the coastline of the northeastern U.S. may recede an average of 200 ft. in the next 50 years; in some parts of Florida, where the land is flatter, the sea might...
...rate of 10 ft. yearly. On Long Island, beach residents shore up dunes with driftwood and old tires. And in Carlsbad, Calif., the community has come up with a number of ideas, from planting plastic kelp to laying a sausage-like tube along the beach in order to trap sand normally washed away during high tide...