FEATURE - UK's Jurassic Coast Feels Heat of Climate Change
Date: 31-Jul-06
Country: UK
Author: Ben Hirschler
But the exposed steel piling behind the promenade and the newly reinforced beach, designed to stop Lyme from crumbling into the sea, show that this, too, is a corner of the planet threatened by climate change.
Many scientists reckon the world is warming due to the "greenhouse effect" caused by emissions from fossil fuels trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The heatwave currently sweeping across large parts of Europe and North America is seen by some as a sign of climate change.
For the past year Lyme, made famous as a setting for Jane Austen's novel "Persuasion" and John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman", has been in the grip of gut-wrenching engineering works.
Holidaymakers lounging on the new beach may not realise it, but Lyme, on the southwest coast of England, sits in the middle of one of the most unstable stretches of coastline in the country with a long history of landslips.
Its very instability is the reason this section of England's southern coast has become known as the Jurassic Coast, in recognition of the rich seam of fossils that are uncovered when cliffs, eroded by the waves, collapse.
Now experts say the pace of landfalls is set to accelerate as global warming leads to rising sea levels and fiercer winter storms battering the fragile blue lias or sea limestone cliffs.
Locals got a taste of things to come in January this year when three-quarters of a million tonnes of rock and clay fell on neighbouring Charmouth beach, stranding a handful of people, in the biggest landslip for 30 years.
ROCK ARMOUR
In a bid to hold back the waves, Lyme has embarked on a 20 million pounds (US$37 million) programme to double the length of rock armour at the end of the ancient Cobb harbour, put more sand and shingle on the beach and stabilise the sea front.
The work has been noisy, dirty and disruptive but Mayor Ken Whetlor reckons the town has no choice.
"You have to put up with that if you want to save your town," he said.
"With the forecasts of rising sea levels, the defences we had in place would not have lasted the course. The decision was either to save this heritage coast or let it go."
Just five miles along the coast, the National Trust charity, Britain's largest owner of coastline, is beating a retreat on Golden Cap, the highest point on England's southern coast.
With the rate of land erosion expected to increase to more than two metres (6.5 ft feet) a year, the Trust has decided to move its cliff-top path up to 25 metres (27 yards) inland.
Over the next century, the organisation expects more than half the 1,130 km (700 miles) of coastline in its care will face similar serious erosion damage.
Britons, none of whom live more than 120 km (75 miles) from the sea, will have to learn to live with the growing impact of climate change, according to the National Trust's assistant director of policy Ellie Robinson.
"We need to explain to people that it is happening here and now in the UK," she said.
"It's not just about ice caps and Bangladesh and hurricanes in the US and drought in Africa. It is happening here at home and we can't kid ourselves that it's just the rest of the world that will be affected."
MANAGED RETREAT
On England's east coast, other towns are also under threat and farmland is being lost to the sea. Climate change here adds to the gradual sinking of the southeast corner of Britain as the Earth's crust continues to adjust to the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
Some larger east coast towns will be protected, as Lyme has been, but smaller communities such as the Norfolk village of Happisburgh are not lucky enough to be given extra sea defences and may go under. It is a policy known as managed retreat.
The government may be investing to defend notable coastal towns like Lyme, Brighton, Blackpool, Bournemouth and Scarborough but Environment Minister Ian Pearson argues it is unrealisti
