From the Chappaquiddick Point to the cranberry bogs in Aquinnah, new forecasts show that no part of the Island will be immune from the impacts of sea level rise.
In 2013 can any community on earth surrounded by the ocean remain passive in the face of unmistakable climate change? If you don’t trust your own memory and sense of the weather to tell you something’s changed, there’s more than enough accurate, trustworthy analysis and predictions out there. But there’s no substitute for direct experience like ours of the last two years. This has been not slow and steady change that we can adapt to smoothly but more like sudden chaos.
Following a category two hurricane or a 50-year coastal storm, Beach Road and Eastville avenue would likely be buried under water, and the only remaining access to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs would be Temahigan Road, according to preliminary results of a risk assessment study prepared by an independent consultant.
But even under a worst-case storm scenario, the actual hospital facility would avoid major flooding, the preliminary study suggests.
The irony of Oak Bluffs is that people so loved its beaches, they set about destroying them.
They built so close to the ocean’s edge they had to defend their development with a seawall. And the seawall prevented the natural replenishment of the sand, so the beach eroded away.
Here is a sobering fact: we live on an Island and the sea is rising.
The consensus among coastal scientists is that our children or grandchildren will see a sea level rise of about one metre in this century, an estimate that does not even take into account the rapid rate of melting glaciers. The New York Times reported last week that “the arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted even by the most pessimistic experts in global warming.”
Rising sea level changes, together with changing geology, may be preventing the breach at Norton Point Beach from closing, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer.
Todd Ehret, an oceanographer with the National Ocean Service in Maryland, said he is aware of Edgartown’s problem. He said there is no assurance that the opening at Norton Point Beach will close, though history suggests it.
When it comes to sandy beaches, barrier beaches and inlets, Mr. Ehret said changes are under way around the country.
Of all the various experts gathered to speak about global warming and sea level rise at last Friday’s Living on the Edge conference on Nantucket, Franklin W. Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, delivered perhaps the most disturbing message.
His insight was not related to the phenomenon itself so much as to the chances of a meaningful and concerted response. It was about politics and psychology more than environmental science.
There’s been a great deal of focus lately on the local effects of the rush by federal and state authorities to build big wind farms near the Vineyard to ameliorate climate change, but very little focus on the local effects of climate change itself.
Except in Oak Bluffs, where there is quiet work underway to prepare for the worst, including sea level rise that is expected to erase beachfront property as it is now known, and the potentially ruinous effects of extreme storms caused by climate change. And it’s all backed by a state grant.
Climate change is complicated; sea level rise is not. We live on an Island — a glorified sandbar — and the sea is closing in on us. It is rising much faster than anticipated. In the last century sea level rose by about a foot. In this century, due to human-induced global warming, it is expected to rise at least five feet, according to a new report by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.
