Humans have been drawn to the coastline for centuries. Due to a historical dependence on maritime commerce and trading by ships, the moderating effect of the ocean on coastal climates, and more recently an esthetic and emotional attachment to the coast, people around the world have been increasingly drawn to the shoreline. The result in the United States today is that 80 per cent of the nation's population lives within an hour of the Atlantic, Pacific, or Gulf coast shoreline or the Great Lakes. Coastal communities continue to grow as the desirability of ocean-front living increases. Thus the normal processes of waves wearing away coastal cliffs and bluffs, beaches and dunes migrating, and an occasional hurricane or severe storm, have become major geologic hazards in the developed coastal areas of the world. The global rise in sea level, combined with the increased and often poorly planned development of erosion-prone ocean-front land, and a number of recent damaging hurricanes, has...
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© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Griggs, G.B. (1999). Coastal erosion and protection. In: Environmental Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_59
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_59
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