10
defined narrowly, does not tell the whole story. The coastal zone is affected, for
example, by the waters that come down the rivers and by the nature and amount of
sediment that characterizes the inner shelf. In return, coastal processes can affect the
characteristics of the coastal plain, for example by intrusion of saline water miles
inland in surface and subsurface waters. Hence, this book documents aspects of a
zone much broader than the coast, encompassing the coastal plain to the inner shelf.
We have heard much in the media about climate change. The authors of this book
recognize that climate change is a natural process. How can we not recognize and
accept this? The entire history of the Earth that we read in the rocks is about change.
Refer again to the Cautionary Tale and glacial deposits in what is now equatorial
Africa. But even greater changes have characterized our Earth. For example, if you
travelled in a time-machine back to the early Earth, 3.5–4 billion years ago (the
Earth is ~4.6 billion years old), and you got out, you would suffer an awful but quite
rapid death because the atmosphere at that time contained no oxygen for you to
breathe. Free atmospheric oxygen arrived millions of years later during the Great
Oxygenation Event (2.4–2.0 billion years ago) and only by about 540 million years
ago did it reach concentrations high enough to lead to the evolution of the animal
groups that are still with us today.
So, the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere has changed since early Earth
History and climate has always changed but we also now know that human activities
are an increasingly important driver of current climate change. This book will not
debate this fact – it has been well demonstrated elsewhere (see IPCC reports, for
example). But readers of the following chapters will see that climate change is a fact
of life and that the geological record of the recent past is important as it provides us
with an understanding of the nature and scale of environmental changes we should
anticipate in the future. Thus, we have changed around that basic tenet of geology
referred to earlier in this Introduction (“The present is the key to the past”) to, “The
past is the key to the future”. If our data-based projections for the future are realistic,
accepting that there are uncertainties and that science progresses, our projections
will become more accurate as new data are collected and new models are run. We
will have a chance of adapting to the warming world mentioned in the Preface and
to mitigating the coastal hazards that come our way (Figs. 1.11 and 1.12).
We start the book with a chapter by Dave Mallinson that introduces the reader to
coastal North Carolina, USA (Fig. 1.13) and, in particular, to what lies beneath the
Outer Banks barrier islands and the sounds behind them. Andy Kemp and Ben
Horton then explain the science behind sea-level studies based on research experience from all over the world. We then return to the Outer Banks and this book’s
editor describes an event of major change that occurred 1200 years ago that might
well happen again in the not too distant future. Pete Parham’s chapter describes his
sea-level studies in Malaysia that come at the question in a completely different way
from that of Kemp and Horton. Next we hear from J.P. Walsh about new ways to
investigate coastal processes, including the high-tech approaches to that tried and
true scientific activity, geologic mapping. Edu Leorri then recounts some of his
coastal pollution research in the Basque Country and gives us his perspective on a
topic de jour, the proposed new geologic interval of time known as the Anthropocene.
S. J. Culver
defined narrowly, does not tell the whole story. The coastal zone is affected, for
example, by the waters that come down the rivers and by the nature and amount of
sediment that characterizes the inner shelf. In return, coastal processes can affect the
characteristics of the coastal plain, for example by intrusion of saline water miles
inland in surface and subsurface waters. Hence, this book documents aspects of a
zone much broader than the coast, encompassing the coastal plain to the inner shelf.
We have heard much in the media about climate change. The authors of this book
recognize that climate change is a natural process. How can we not recognize and
accept this? The entire history of the Earth that we read in the rocks is about change.
Refer again to the Cautionary Tale and glacial deposits in what is now equatorial
Africa. But even greater changes have characterized our Earth. For example, if you
travelled in a time-machine back to the early Earth, 3.5–4 billion years ago (the
Earth is ~4.6 billion years old), and you got out, you would suffer an awful but quite
rapid death because the atmosphere at that time contained no oxygen for you to
breathe. Free atmospheric oxygen arrived millions of years later during the Great
Oxygenation Event (2.4–2.0 billion years ago) and only by about 540 million years
ago did it reach concentrations high enough to lead to the evolution of the animal
groups that are still with us today.
So, the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere has changed since early Earth
History and climate has always changed but we also now know that human activities
are an increasingly important driver of current climate change. This book will not
debate this fact – it has been well demonstrated elsewhere (see IPCC reports, for
example). But readers of the following chapters will see that climate change is a fact
of life and that the geological record of the recent past is important as it provides us
with an understanding of the nature and scale of environmental changes we should
anticipate in the future. Thus, we have changed around that basic tenet of geology
referred to earlier in this Introduction (“The present is the key to the past”) to, “The
past is the key to the future”. If our data-based projections for the future are realistic,
accepting that there are uncertainties and that science progresses, our projections
will become more accurate as new data are collected and new models are run. We
will have a chance of adapting to the warming world mentioned in the Preface and
to mitigating the coastal hazards that come our way (Figs. 1.11 and 1.12).
We start the book with a chapter by Dave Mallinson that introduces the reader to
coastal North Carolina, USA (Fig. 1.13) and, in particular, to what lies beneath the
Outer Banks barrier islands and the sounds behind them. Andy Kemp and Ben
Horton then explain the science behind sea-level studies based on research experience from all over the world. We then return to the Outer Banks and this book’s
editor describes an event of major change that occurred 1200 years ago that might
well happen again in the not too distant future. Pete Parham’s chapter describes his
sea-level studies in Malaysia that come at the question in a completely different way
from that of Kemp and Horton. Next we hear from J.P. Walsh about new ways to
investigate coastal processes, including the high-tech approaches to that tried and
true scientific activity, geologic mapping. Edu Leorri then recounts some of his
coastal pollution research in the Basque Country and gives us his perspective on a
topic de jour, the proposed new geologic interval of time known as the Anthropocene.
S. J. Culver