Our beaches are eroding, sinking, washing out right under our houses, hotels, bridges; vacation dreamlands become nightmare scenes of futile revetments, fills, groins, what have you—all thrown up in a frantic defense against the natural system. The romantic desire to live on the seashore is in doomed conflict with an age-old pattern of beach migration. Yet it need not be so. Conservationist Wallace Kaufman teams up with marine geologist Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., in an evaluation of America's beaches from coast to coast, giving sound advice on how to judge a safe beach development from a dangerous one and how to live at the shore sensibly and safely. "[T]he definitive work describing the dynamics of barrier islands--and the futility of trying to stabilize them." --Richard Hart, Independent Weekly Our beaches are eroding, sinking, washing out right under our houses, hotels, bridges; vacation dreamlands become nightmare scenes of futile revetments, fills, groins, what have you--all thrown up in a frantic defense against the natural system. The Beaches Are Moving The Drowning of America's Shoreline By Wallace Kaufman, Orrin H. Pilkey Jr. Duke University Press Copyright © 1983 Wallace Kaufman and Orrin H. Pilkey, Jr. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-0574-3 Contents Atlantic Flyway, Acknowledgments, Prologue, 1 The Beaches Are Moving, 2 Who's Afraid of Sea Level?, 3 The Beaches Are Made of Continents, 4 Energy: Winds, Waves, and Tides, 5 The Beach Is Four Miles Wide, 6 Barrier Islands: Let the Lighthouse Fall, 7 The Human Nature of Natural Disaster, 8 The Will to Power: An Old World Heritage, 9 Sand Castles and Supermen, 10 Engineered Shorelines: The Point of No Return, 11 Who Owns the Beaches?, 12 How to Live with a Beach, Epilogue: It's Not All Over Now, Checklist for Buying or Building on the Beach, Where to See the Beaches Moving: The Most Beautiful and the Most Beleaguered Beaches on Three Coasts, Bibliography of Useful References, CHAPTER 1 The Beaches Are Moving A PERSON CAN live on a mountain, in a desert, or on a suburban lot, and after a few years he can say: "I know every inch of this place, every rock, tree, weed, and fold of earth." No one can say that about the shoreline or the beaches. The beach is land which has given itself up to wind and wave. Every day throughout the life of the earth, the wind and the waves have been at work shaping and reshaping the beach, pushing and pulling almost microscopic grains of sand and sometimes boulders larger than cars. For practical purposes there may be days when no wind blows, but even on the stillest days, when the sea lies like a flawless mirror, a wave moves against the shore. This is the wave of the tide, a gigantic slow sloshing of the sea within the oceanic basins. As the sea and the wind move, the beaches move. A glance at maps of the American coastline, from Vespucci to the U. S. Geological Survey, seems to show little change. There's the Florida peninsula, the familiar elbow of Cape Hatteras, the great fish form of Long Island, and the hook of Cape Cod. Yet, comparisons of detailed maps show that privateers, pirates, and adventurers sailed a different coastline than our Founding Fathers defended against Britain. The coast illumined by the "rockets' red glare" is not the coast of our Bicentennial. From map to map islands change shape, inlets appear and disappear, shoals shrink or grow, and capes of land stretch further and further out to sea. To know the beaches is to know the beaches are moving. We ignore this when we build motels, pavilions, boardwalks, and even whole towns on the edge of the ocean. In our business hats we do not recognize any real estate as movable. Corners are staked, lines drawn, and neat rectangular lots are recorded in courthouses as if they would be true forever. But in our play we are guided by a different vision. On almost any summer day on any sandy beach in the United States, adults and children alike amuse themselves with sand castles, moats, road systems, arches, miniature towns, and statues of each other. Here at the beach is one of the few socially acceptable forms of carefree play for adults. In molded damp sand we build images of our dreams and hopes. The water takes them away, as time one day takes our very lives. Amateur engineers may be fascinated with what we build, but perhaps the more interesting question is, Why do we make these little sacrifices? Perhaps, freed of economic and social concerns, we set aside our passion for monuments, history, and permanence and admit we are part of the ceaseless change that is nature. The waves and tides which accept our sacrifices of sand castles and statues are only a small part of the forces that keep the beaches in motion. One way of understanding the dynamic nature of the beach would be to imagine yourself a photographer setting out to do a photo essay and a film on the beach. An ordinary snapshot would reveal a static, s