Mike Beck has an enviable commute: an eight-mile drive along the coastal bluffs that separate the city of Santa Cruz from the ocean. Hemmed in by highways and homes to one side and rising, ever-stormier seas to the other, beaches are shrinking up and down the state.
The U. Geological Survey estimates that California could lose three-quarters of its beaches by Dozens of species depend on those sandy shores. Our beaches also provide a natural buffer from flooding, erosion and other natural disasters for millions of California residents. Beck, who today heads the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at UC Santa Cruz , has spent his career helping communities understand how and why their shorelines are changing, and what to do about it.
UC expertise, spanning climate, ecology, oceanography, geomorphology, economics, engineering and social science, informs the day-to-day decisions Californians make about our coasts. As the climate warms and the oceans rise, the urgency of UC coastal research is rising too.
To understand why our beaches are shrinking, it helps to understand how they got here in the first place. Sandy shores often form in shallow bays and inlets, where they are protected from waves, explains Ian Walker, a geomorphologist and professor of geography at UC Santa Barbara.
Beaches have accreted, eroded and migrated with changes in sea level, tides and climate. As continental ice sheets melted and the seas rose, beaches recreated themselves at the new higher tide line. It happened fast enough that people living along the coast of California 12, years ago would have noticed the change within a single lifetime, or at least from generation to generation. For the past 6, years, sea levels have been relatively stable. Now the climate is warming again. Research from UC Santa Cruz found that two-thirds of the sand that used to make it to the coast is trapped on land.
