Coral atolls getting larger, not sinking according to new study using satellite data
Andrew Montford writes:
Close watchers of the climate scene will probably be familiar with the work of Kench et al., who put a big spanner in the works of the climate alarm community, by demonstrating that coral atolls, far from disappearing beneath the waves, had been getting bigger over the last few decades.
Now, a new paper in Nature Scientific Reports looks as though it is going to add a fairly substantial hammer blow to those same works. The authors, Luijendijk et al., have surveyed sandy beaches around the world using current and historic satellite photographs – the same approach used by Kench – and have found that, in contrast to what a simple ‘global warming equals sea level rise’ approach might predict, more are getting larger rather are shrinking.
Abstract
Coastal zones constitute one of the most heavily populated and developed land zones in the world. Despite the utility and economic benefits that coasts provide, there is no reliable global-scale assessment of historical shoreline change trends. Here, via the use of freely available optical satellite images captured since 1984, in conjunction with sophisticated image interrogation and analysis methods, we present a global-scale assessment of the occurrence of sandy beaches and rates of shoreline change therein. Applying pixel-based supervised classification, we found that 31% of the world’s ice-free shoreline are sandy. The application of an automated shoreline detection method to the sandy shorelines thus identified resulted in a global dataset of shoreline change rates for the 33 year period 1984–2016. Analysis of the satellite derived shoreline data indicates that 24% of the world’s sandy beaches are eroding at rates exceeding 0.5?m/yr, while 28% are accreting and 48% are stable. The majority of the sandy shorelines in marine protected areas are eroding, raising cause for serious concern.
Willis identified this a long time ago on WUWT. I’d say his work has been vindicated.
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Volcanoes rise When They are active and fall down again When They are dead. Coral Islands are a living organism that builds When The top of The Crater gest below sealevel. One place They found The original top of The Crater 800 meters below sealevel. At The END of The last iceage sealevel rose 130 meters. So me mot worry.
The sub-heading of the above article reads:
“Coral atolls getting larger, not sinking according to new study using satellite data”
I downloaded the study in question, which is entitled “The State of the World’s Beaches”, and used ‘Microsoft Word’ to search for the words “coral”, “atoll” and “atolls”. They do not appear. The study is about beaches, not coral atolls.
Nor does the study consider the effect of sea level rise on beach erosion or accretion. In fact it states explicitly that “random deviation from ‘mean sea level… is assumed to have a limited effect on the 33-year trend of shoreline change”.
One interesting point to note is that in Table 2 of the study they list the 7 beaches classified as being the most “Erosive Hot Spots” globally and 4 of these are on the US east coast : Freeport, Texas; Rockefeller Reserve, Louisiana; High Island, Texas; and Hog Island, Virginia. Collectively these beaches are eroding at a rate of over 760,000 m2/yr (about 0.3 miles2/yr).
Does anyone think this is the result of sea level rise on the east coast USA? If not, then why should we think that beach accretion is the result of a ‘lack’ of sea level rise elsewhere?
but, just think how much bigger they would be if it weren’t for Global Warming…