Perilous
Times
Australia: Beach goers in shock as east coast beaches are
disappearing fast as harsh currents sweep all the sand out
to sea
Hundreds of miles of Australia's most popular beaches are
shrinking as ocean currents sweep their sands out to sea, to the
dismay of millions of beach goers
By Jonathan Pearlman in Kingscliff
8:05PM GMT 25 Feb 2012
AAP
At Kingscliff Beach on Australia's east coast, home to one of the
country's oldest surf clubs, tourists and locals have long spent
summers on the lush stretch of golden sand. But now the beach is
no longer there.
Instead, the 65-yard-wide stretch of sand – hundreds of thousands
of cubic metres of it - has disappeared, swept into waters to the
north where it has been carried by the tide to form sandbanks.
And with it have gone some of the classic images of Australia's
coast - a surfing mecca that lures more than two million people a
year to ride the waves, and many more to swim off the spectacular
beaches.
Of 309 regularly frequented stretches of surfing coastline, 38 now
have beach areas that have shrunk to 30 feet wide or less. Heavily
eroded beaches include Sydney's second-longest,
Narrabeen-Collaroy, which has had to have thousands of tons of
sand trucked in and dumped along its two-and-a-quarter mile
shoreline.
At the resort town of Noosa, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast,
beaches have lost up to 50 yards in width over the past three
years.
Asked whether the beaches will ever return to their former state,
Rodger Tomlinson, one of Australia's leading experts on coastal
erosion, said simply: "We don't know."
The rapid disappearance of the sand has puzzled scientists, who
are still trying to gauge its varying causes and are examining
whether – and to what extent - the beaches will ever be naturally
restored by currents bringing new deposits of sand from elsewhere.
The most likely culprit, they believe, is a change in weather
conditions, with increasingly frequent storms caused by La Nina, a
cyclical cooling in ocean temperatures that seems to be recurring
more frequently.
In the past 18 months, Australia has endured one of the fiercest
La Nina events in history - leading to its wettest two-year period
since instrumental recording began in the 1880s, and causing
devastating floods across large areas inland.
Along the coast, powerful storms and strong tides have swept away
the sand, while changes in wave direction have dragged it
offshore. As a result there is a new threat to coastal properties,
with erosion of cliffs accelerated not because of rising tides –
the ocean at Kingscliff only has a tidal variation of about five
feet - but because the beach that dissipated the power of the
waves has been diminished as the sand has gone.
Scientists say it could take a decade or more for these beaches to
be naturally restored - if, indeed, they ever are.
"This is a new situation for us - the sand is all gone," said
Richard Adams, who runs a holiday park overlooking what used to be
the beach at Kingscliff, 50 miles south of Brisbane. "This was all
thick fluffy white sand, not this white water you can see now. It
used to be one of the best beaches in Australia."
Some 80 per cent of Australians live on or near to the coast, and
much of development near the edge of the ocean occurred during a
period of relatively mild weather towards the end of the last
century.
"We had pretty calm weather throughout the last three decades –
now we are moving back into an era of stormy conditions,
especially with La Nina," Prof Tomlinson said. "The erosion seems
to be triggered by reasonably sized storms and very subtle shifts
in wave direction.
"We also think we are having a situation of more energetic wave
conditions, possibly caused by warmer waters offshore."
The disappearance of the sand has worried local lifesavers, who
stand trained and ready with rescue equipment but have little or
no beach to patrol.
"We're a bunch of lifesavers who essentially can't get on to our
beach," said a disgruntled team member, Andrew Jones. His beach,
Old Bar in northern New South Wales, has lost 75 yards of frontage
in the past 18 months. A report commissioned by Surf Life Saving
Australia, the organisation responsible for water safety and
rescue, found 63 per cent of the country's surf lifesaving clubs
were themselves erected in "zones of potential instability".
At Kingscliff, where a hastily built wall has helped save the
headquarters from collapse, locals joke that they may have to turn
their 90-year-old surf club into a yacht club.
Dot Holdom, a councillor who has lived in the town for 30 years,
said the only recent increase in visitors has been from "disaster
tourists" who stop by to see the vanished beach.
"It was traumatic watching the beach go," she said. "You're torn
between awe at mother nature and dismay at watching something that
you love fall away. But it is not the end for the town. It has
just changed."
According to Prof Tomlinson, Australians will have to accept that
they must either "retreat" from parts of the coast, or just accept
that the beaches will increasingly disappear.
"The average person thinks the beach was there last year when they
went on their holidays, so it will be there again next year," he
said.
"Australians have not really adjusted. We still have that special
relationship to the beach; it's our holiday destination, our
economy, our relaxation. But in the absence of proper management,
we are going to see a long term reduction in our beaches."