UK's Jurassic Coast feels heat of climate change
The quaint seaside town of Lyme Regis with its narrow, winding streets seems a million miles from the melting polar ice caps or the flooded coral atolls of the Pacific.
But the exposed steel piling behind the promenade and the newly reinforced beach, designed to stop Lyme from crumbling into the sea, show that this, too, is a corner of the planet threatened by climate change.
Many scientists reckon the world is warming due to the "greenhouse effect" caused by emissions from fossil fuels trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The heat wave currently sweeping across large parts of Europe and North America is seen by some as a sign of climate change.
For the past year Lyme, made famous as a setting for Jane Austen's novel "Persuasion" and John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," has been in the grip of gut-wrenching engineering works.
Vacationers lounging on the new beach may not realize it, but Lyme, on the southwest coast of England, sits in the middle of one of the most unstable stretches of coastline in the country with a long history of landslips.
Its very instability is the reason this section of England's southern coast has become known as the Jurassic Coast, in recognition of the rich seam of fossils that are uncovered when cliffs, eroded by the waves, collapse.
Now experts say the pace of landfalls is set to accelerate as global warming leads to rising sea levels and fiercer winter storms battering the fragile blue lias or sea limestone cliffs.
But the exposed steel piling behind the promenade and the newly reinforced beach, designed to stop Lyme from crumbling into the sea, show that this, too, is a corner of the planet threatened by climate change.
Many scientists reckon the world is warming due to the "greenhouse effect" caused by emissions from fossil fuels trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The heat wave currently sweeping across large parts of Europe and North America is seen by some as a sign of climate change.
For the past year Lyme, made famous as a setting for Jane Austen's novel "Persuasion" and John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," has been in the grip of gut-wrenching engineering works.
Vacationers lounging on the new beach may not realize it, but Lyme, on the southwest coast of England, sits in the middle of one of the most unstable stretches of coastline in the country with a long history of landslips.
Its very instability is the reason this section of England's southern coast has become known as the Jurassic Coast, in recognition of the rich seam of fossils that are uncovered when cliffs, eroded by the waves, collapse.
Now experts say the pace of landfalls is set to accelerate as global warming leads to rising sea levels and fiercer winter storms battering the fragile blue lias or sea limestone cliffs.
Locals got a taste of things to come in January this year when three-quarters of a million tons of rock and clay fell on neighboring Charmouth beach, stranding a handful of people, in the biggest landslip for 30 years.
1 Comments:
Very interesting post! Something that I've been spending increasing lengths of time researching in relation to the Jurassic Coast
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