Leading coastal scientists, managers and others will gather Monday for a daylong conference at the Harbor View Hotel looking at the Island’s changing coastline, from shifting sands at Katama to managed retreat at Squibnocket.
At high tide on a sunny day in the year 2100, a visit to Five Corners in Vineyard Haven could mean a swim with the fishes. New maps created by the Martha's Vineyard Commission project a changing seascape.
Seas around the Vineyard are rising slightly faster than the global average and Island planners should prepare for significant sea level rise by the end of the century, a new climate change report has found.
The Vineyard Conservation Society report examines the effects of climate change on the Martha’s Vineyard and its surroundings.
From the Chappaquiddick Point to the cranberry bogs in Aquinnah, new forecasts show that no part of the Island will be immune from the impacts of sea level rise.
In 2013 can any community on earth surrounded by the ocean remain passive in the face of unmistakable climate change? If you don’t trust your own memory and sense of the weather to tell you something’s changed, there’s more than enough accurate, trustworthy analysis and predictions out there. But there’s no substitute for direct experience like ours of the last two years. This has been not slow and steady change that we can adapt to smoothly but more like sudden chaos.
Climate change is complicated; sea level rise is not. We live on an Island — a glorified sandbar — and the sea is closing in on us. It is rising much faster than anticipated. In the last century sea level rose by about a foot. In this century, due to human-induced global warming, it is expected to rise at least five feet, according to a new report by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.