Recent acceleration in coastal cliff retreat rates on the south coast of Great Britain.

ABSTRACT: Rising sea levels and increased storminess are expected to accelerate the erosion of soft-cliff coastlines, threatening coastal infrastructure and livelihoods. To develop predictive models of future coastal change we need fundamentally to know how rapidly coasts have been eroding in the past, and to understand the driving mechanisms of coastal change. Direct observations of cliff retreat rarely extend beyond 150 y, during which humans have significantly modified the coastal system. Cliff retreat rates are unknown in prior centuries and millennia. In this study, we derived retreat rates of chalk cliffs on the south coast of Great Britain over millennial time scales by coupling high-precision cosmogenic radionuclide geochronology and rigorous numerical modeling. Measured ¹⁰Be conc

SUBMITTER: Hurst MD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5127313 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature