By Shorelines worldwide have always been vulnerable to coastal erosion, a phenomenon rendered more ominous by rising sea levels that accompany modern-day climate change (SN: 9/29/22).
Coastal engineers have few ways to address this erosion, says Alessandro Rotta Loria, a civil engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. One method is to build a seawall; another is to truck in more sand once wave action sweeps away a beach’s supply. Neither approach works more than a few years, he notes. And injecting plastics or other substances to help consolidate loose sand would have detrimental effects on the environment.
