Edward Robinson, Deborah-Ann C. Rowe and Shakira A. Khan, Contributors
The results of severe erosion of the Jamaican coastline.
This is the fourth in a series of articles on Hazards of the Jamaican Coastline contributed by the Marine Geology Unit, Department of Geography and Geology, University of the West Indies, with funding support from the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica.
IN THE South Pacific, Papua New Guinea's Carteret islands are being drowned by rising sea levels. Over the past 20 years the inhabitants of these islands have watched their homes being washed away by waves and their fruit trees die as the water supply becomes increasingly saline, contaminated by rising sea levels.
As their food supplies diminished and their water became too salty to drink, the people have had to rely on the larger islands for nourishment. Eventually, the government came to the decision that the island's 2,000 people had to be evacuated. The inhabitants are now being relocated, 10 persons at a time, to the sister island of Bougainville.
Two uninhabited Kiribati islands, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, disappeared underwater in 1999. The president of the drowning 33 islands said they were moving back from the shoreline, but were in danger of falling off the back side of the islands.
Is this a true glimpse into the near future for Jamaica, the shape of things to come, perhaps a hundred years from now? Will the people of the low-lying and coastal areas of Jamaica have to be relocated to higher ground?
Having traced the progress of sea level rise in a previous article, we now look at some of the problems of eroding beaches, and why some beaches seem more prone to erosion than others. Reports of beaches being seriously eroded usually hit the newspapers after a spell of stormy weather, be it from a tropical depression or a norther.
The fact that many beaches recover following erosion is not so often reported. This is one reason it can be quite difficult sometimes to figure out how much erosion of a permanent nature is taking place. Another reason is that concerns about beach erosion and checks on the amount of erosion going on have only been carried out over the past 30 years or so for Jamaica.
This is a miniscule amount of time to use as a baseline for predictions of erosion in the future. The only sure way of keeping track is to monitor and survey beach changes periodically indefinitely into the future, and to examine historical maps and air photos in order to extend the baseline into the past.
