Barrier islands protect the coastline from storms, storm surge, waves and flooding.
Barrier islands protect the coastline from storms, storm surge, waves and flooding. They can act as a buffer between the ocean and beachfront property. As sea level rises, barrier islands retreat, or move closer toward the shore, which diminishes the buffer and protection. New information published today shows the retreat of coastal barrier islands will accelerate by 50 percent within a century, even if sea level continues to rise at its present rate.
“These findings can be applied all over the world, but they may be particularly significant in the U.S., where houses are being built extremely close to the beach,” said LSU Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences and Center for Computation and Technology Associate Professor Giulio Mariotti, who is the lead author of the paper published today in Nature Geoscience.
“It is well known that barrier islands retreat as sea level rises, but it has not been clear how,” Mariotti said.
Mariotti and co-author Christopher Hein of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science noticed that sea level rise increased dramatically in the 1900s, but barrier island retreat has not increased as much. Mariotti investigated this phenomenon and developed a computer model that is the first to show a more nuanced relationship between sea level rise and barrier island retreat than previous models. The new model shows a lag between sea level rise and barrier island retreat – thus challenging the common assumption that barrier islands respond instantaneously to sea level rise.
Read more at Louisiana State University
