Molly Samuel/KQED

Trucks are moving sand from the north end of Ocean Beach to the south end.

Portions of San Francisco’s historic Great Highway are closed for a massive sand-moving project, part of an effort to slow erosion along the stretch of Pacific coastline known as Ocean Beach. By the end of the project, trucks will have moved about 100,000 cubic yards of sand.

“It’s the equivalent of 31 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. “It’s a lot of sand that we’re having to move in a short period of time and that’s why we’re closing down the lanes of the Great Highway to accommodate the truck traffic.”

The worst of the erosion is at the south end of the beach. Luckily, the north end actually has too much sand. The city is working with the National Park Service, to see if moving sand is more effective at stemming erosion than piling up boulders has been. The Park Service controls the south end of the beach, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area known as Fort Funston. The GGNRA and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission have been involved in the creation of the Ocean Beach Master Plan, a bold initiative to stem erosion and prepare for sea level rise at Ocean Beach, though this particular project is not a part of that plan.

Southbound lanes of the Great Highway will be off-limits from 6:00 am until 5:00 pm on weekdays. The beach is still accessible, though some parking is affected. The project is supposed to be completed by the end of September.

Read more about the Ocean Beach Sand Management Project at the Ocean Beach Bulletin.

Hear the radio version of this story from KQED’s The California Report.

Mike Newland

A site with evidence of more than 1,000 years of occupation is eroding due to high tides hitting the base of the cliff.

On a sunny day earlier this summer at Point Reyes National Seashore, I scrambled behind Mike Newland as he clambered across gullies and bushwhacked through thigh-high lupine. Once we got to the spot he was aiming for, on the edge of a sandy beach-side cliff, he stopped and started to pick through shells and stones.

“You can see, we’ve got sort of a handful of little guys here, popping out of the ground,” he noted. “Some of these that we’re going to see, they weren’t here a year ago, when I came here last time.”

Newland, an archaeologist at Sonoma State University and the president of the Society for California Archaeology, was hunting for Native American artifacts, clues about what life was like in coastal California before Europeans arrived. It was easy for him to find them; wind, rain and tides have eroded these cliffs and exposed the ancient trash piles and stone tools.

This site and these cultural resources — some of them a thousand years old or more — might not be around for much longer. These pieces of California’s history are in danger of disappearing as the Pacific Ocean claws at the base of this cliff. Sea level rise is accelerating the problem.

It’s not just that the tides will be higher. The cliffs are so soft, they could recede hundreds of feet back, with just a few feet of sea level rise.

“You know, this isn’t just gonna be a matter of, the ocean’s going to pop up and cover it up and then we can get back to it later,” Newland said. “These sites are toast. And we’re essentially losing them all at once.”

Nick Tipon, a retired high school teacher and member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, whose territory includes Point Reyes, said he became aware of the extent of the erosion several years ago.

“In one part of the park, there’s a layer of soil that indicates human habitation in that spot, and sticking out from the side of a cliff was a human skull,” he said. When human remains are disturbed or exhumed, tribal policy is to rebury them as close as possible to where they were found. “So then we thought, ‘How far inland do we have to go away from the cliff to find stable soil? So we don’t have to do this 100 years, 200 years again? So that literally our ancestors can rest in peace?’”

Newland says there is evidence that people have lived in California for at least 11,000 years, and the soft sandstone cliffs on the coast have always been susceptible to erosion. Traditionally, Tipon said, the tribe would have let the ocean take burial sites, since it was a natural process. But now, with two million or so people visiting the park every year, they can’t leave human remains exposed.

Meanwhile, climate change threatens to expose more of them. A tide gauge in the nearby Golden Gate has recorded eight inches of sea level rise in the past century. Scientists project it could rise three feet in the next.

Michael Newland

Just looks like a rock, right? Archeologist Mike Newland says, "This is a crypto-crystalline silicate cobble that was broken by native peoples, probably to get material for making stone tools. It comes from a high-risk site along the western edge of Point Reyes National Seashore."

Point Reyes contains more than 120 Coast Miwok settlement sites. (The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria includes both the Coast Miwok and the Southern Pomo people.) The National Park Service works closely with Native Americans to protect graves and other important objects or sites. And the Park Service supports and conducts climate research and has programs to help mitigate and adapt to changes coming to the parks. But Mark Rudo, a National Park Service archaeologist, said the Park Service isn’t prepared to deal with the scale of the threat that sea level rise presents.

“At the same time that we’re trying to figure out what the impacts are, we’re also trying to identify what we can do about them, so it’s not an easy situation to work in,” he said. It’s a special challenge with archaeological sites. While it may be possible for natural resources, plants and animals, to migrate, Rudo pointed out that cultural resources, like archaeological sites that remain in the ground, can’t be moved, even with help. “We’re stuck,” he said. “We can’t hide or run away from the problem, or adapt to it.”

But the park does have help measuring the extent of the problem. Newland is recruiting archaeologists from all over the state in a volunteer effort to survey sites along the coast in Marin, Monterey, San Diego and Del Norte Counties, and he hopes to continue expanding the project, to study the thousands of sites up and down the California coast.

“We have to be honest. Most of the sites are going to be destroyed,” he said. “But we should at least know what we’re going to lose. That’s my goal.” At Point Reyes alone, Newland has found that 54 of the 160 sites he studies are in danger of being erased in the next century, and most of the others face some level of threat from other climate change impacts.

And he emphasized, this is going to be a problem everywhere.

“We are in the process of losing all of our maritime sites as a species. Every place that we’ve launched off to go explore the world through the ocean is now at risk,” Newland said.

Tipon, who’s a tribal liaison to the parks, said they’ll have to decide what to try to protect on a case-by-case basis, but he’s less concerned about any given object than with people and culture. And that won’t be washed away as easily.

“One of the questions I get asked a lot when I give speeches is, ‘How long have your people been here?’ And I go, ‘Well, you know, the archaeologists say that it’s 3,000 years, 7,000 years, 11,000 years,’” he said. “But the cultural response is: we’ve been here forever. So how long are we going to be around? We will be here forever.”

Molly Samuel/KQED

At San Francisco's Ocean Beach, erosion and sea level rise threaten infrastructure.

As an Army Corps of Engineers dredge dumped sand offshore, a crowd of politicians, representatives from local and federal agencies, business owners and volunteers gathered in a crumbling parking lot on Thursday to voice their support for the Ocean Beach Master Plan, a sweeping project to prepare for sea level rise and stem erosion on San Francisco’s western shore.

Project manager Benjamin Grant said that with more than a million dollars in grants now secured, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) is ready to get down to the nitty-gritty details of how to implement the plan, which was officially released in June.

“There’s a lot of work that goes into taking something from a big visionary idea to a project that’s actually in the pipeline at a public agency,” Grant said.

Some smaller elements of the plan will happen quickly, without much bureaucratic shuffling (such as adding medians to a nearby street, which was tacked on to an existing paving project), but others will take decades.

Molly Samuel/KQED

A truck dumps sand onto Ocean Beach. Sand blowing off of the beach causes road closures on the Great Highway.

Take the Great Highway – “the finest stretch of highway ever constructed” (at least, as it was touted in 1929) – now a road frequently closed by blowing sand and encroaching erosion. The Plan calls for a section of the road to be re-routed away from the coast, what generals like to call “strategic withdrawal” and urban planners refer to as “managed retreat.” That’s dozens of years down the line. Meanwhile, life (and erosion) goes on, and stretches of the road will be repaved beginning this winter.

“It’s going to be quite a number of years, if not decades, before the full process of closing that stretch of road would be implemented,” Grant said. “So it’s not worth not repaving it today.” Even so, a portion of the Great Highway had been closed for sand removal even as officials gathered for Thursday’s event.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee thanked the host of people who had a hand in crafting the plan, and even threw in a shout-out for a threatened coastal denizen, the snowy plover, but he tempered his congratulations with a reminder about the long process ahead.

“We do have to go through our governmental processes of adoption and review, and make sure that the ideas here also meet the various legal requirements that we’re obligated to carry forth on behalf of the public,” he said. On the other hand, he acknowledged what he’d learned working at San Francisco’s Department of Public Works. “You just cannot fight nature. You’ve gotta respect it,” he said.

Grant says the entire Ocean Beach Master Plan, closely watched as a test case for coastal cities pondering sea rise strategies, will cost about $350 million to implement over 40 years.

Quest/KQED

The Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard is one of the EPA's Superfund sites in the Bay Area.

As water levels rise, old landfills, shipyards and industrial sites that line the San Francisco Bay are at risk of being submerged, exposed to higher storm surges and inundated by groundwater. Toxic substances, including arsenic, lead, petroleum products, asbestos and DDT that have been sealed off could leech into groundwater or into the Bay.

While the agencies that have a hand in keeping the Bay clean consider sea level rise in new clean-up projects, they can’t necessarily revisit every old one, according to reporter Nate Seltenrich, who wrote about the problem in this week’s East Bay Express.

“There’s a good likelihood that containment measures that were put in place before sea level rise, and may still be effective now, will no longer be effective,” Seltenrich told me. “The real challenge is money. The costs that could be associated with going back and retrofitting any previously contained site, it’s really expensive.”

In his article, Seltenrich wrote that there are forty or more sites that will be affected by sea level rise:

Among the most contaminated locations are Alameda’s Naval Air Station, Richmond’s United Heckathorn site (a former shipyard and agricultural chemical warehouse), and San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Other cities containing waterfront toxic sites include Oakland, Hayward, Newark, Hercules, Rodeo, Antioch, Novato, Tiburon, Sausalito, South San Francisco, Redwood City, San Mateo, and East Palo Alto; Richmond has more waterfront toxic sites than any other city, with a total of nine.

There are eight Superfund sites near the Bay, according to EPA Region 9 Director Jared Blumenfeld. The EPA factors sea level rise into its clean-up plans, and it reviews each Superfund site every five years. But Blumenfeld says these big sites won’t necessarily be the biggest problems as the sea level rises.

“There are everyday operations that would need to be examined, from a mechanic’s shops to dry cleaners, that have the potential to be toxic,” he said. With sea levels projected to rise three feet or more in the next century, businesses that handle chemicals on a daily basis could be flooded.

Bruce Wolfe of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board echoed that view.

“We wouldn’t necessarily single out what might be called toxic sites, we would say that any site that has the potential for waste to get into either surface water or groundwater is a concern,” he said.

“Historically we have used the Bay margin as a place to put disposal sites, so we’ve always had this challenge to manage sites that are adjacent to the Bay, be they landfills or the military sites,” Wolfe added. “So this just adds another layer of challenge.”

Scorpions and Centaurs/Flickr

San Francisco International Airport could be underwater within the next few decades.

By 2030, sea levels on most of California’s coast will be five inches higher than ten years ago. By 2100, three feet higher. That’s according to a new report by the National Research Council. The study arrived at numbers that aren’t far from previous projections of sea level rise, but other research has been on a global scale, and this one focused specifically on the West Coast.

“What was surprising to me was Oregon and Washington being so different,” Robert Dalrymple told me; he’s a professor of civil engineering at Johns Hopkins University and chair of the Committee on Sea Level Rise in California, Oregon, and Washington, which wrote the report.

Sea level rise happens at different rates at different places. It’s not just caused by land ice melting, though that is the primary driver. Another factor that causes sea level rise on a global scale is thermal expansion; warmer water takes up more space than cooler water.

And then there are regional and local factors. Climate patterns over the Pacific, for instance El Niño, can drive the sea level higher. And faults can make it seem higher; that’s where the differences between California and the other West Coast states come in. California, south of Cape Mendocino, is subsiding. North of Cape Mendocino and up into Oregon and Washington, the land is rising.

“Since the land is rising, it looks like the sea level is falling,” Dalrymple said. So for areas north of Cape Mendocino, sea level rise will be less drastic (at least until a major earthquake undoes all that rising). Whereas in most of California, the land is sinking while the sea rises. Storms and high tides will make it worse.

Low-lying areas, including San Francisco International Airport could flood within a few decades.  The news isn’t any better if you live near a cliff: erosion is already working away at California’s coasts. Dalrymple says without factoring in sea level rise, the shoreline would erode 10 to 30 meters in the next hundred years. “It’s bad now. It’s going to be worse in the future.”

Lauren Sommer/KQED

Salt ponds in Redwood City where the new Saltworks development is proposed.

The low-lying land along the Bay in Redwood City has been the center of a climate controversy: should the salt ponds that have been producing salt for Cargill for decades be turned into housing, or back into wetlands? Supporters of the development point out that Silicon Valley needs more housing. Supporters of the wetlands respond, birds need a place to land, too — plus, the wetlands will provide a much-needed buffer as the sea level rises.

Now, the fight is on hold: DMB Associates, the developer that is working with Cargill on a plan to turn nearly 1,500 acres of salt ponds into Saltworks, has officially withdrawn its application from the City Council of Redwood City. That’s after an ad hoc subcommittee of the council recommended that the application be denied at this coming Monday’s meeting.

The recommendation is included in the agenda for the upcoming meeting:

Direct staff to prepare findings and a resolution denying the current application, on the grounds that after being on file with the City for three years, the developer has yet to submit a complete project description and the application remains inactive. If and when the developer presents a new and complete project application to the City, the City will determine whether and how to proceed on the application at that time.

“They are putting it to bed for now, rather than letting it drag out,” Malcolm Smith, the Public Communications Manager for Redwood City told me. He emphasized, this doesn’t mean the salt ponds won’t be developed, just that that it won’t be happening under this particular plan.

KQED’s Lauren Sommer reported on the controversy surrounding the development for Climate Watch last year.

Read more:

• The Daily Journal: Saltworks plan dries up
• Save the Bay: Cargill Bay Fill Development Defeated

As head of NOAA’s Coastal Services Center, Margaret Davidson has her eye firmly on the future of the country’s coasts, and the threats imposed from rising seas and more extreme weather. Davidson is based in South Carolina, but is a close watcher of California, where coast and climate may be on a collision course.

Climate Watch Senior Editor Craig Miller spoke with Davidson about sea level rise and the California coast. Their conversation will air this evening on This Week in Northern California, on KQED Public Television 9.

Here’s a clip that’s not included the TV broadcast.

Read more about San Francisco’s plans to slow erosion and prepare for sea level rise at Ocean Beach:

• Ocean Beach Bulletin: Ocean Beach Master Plan Charts Course for Future
• SPUR’s Ocean Beach Master Plan website
• Climate Watch stories on Ocean Beach

Bureau of Engineering / City of Los Angeles

November's sea cliff failure took out 600+ feet of roadway and sidewalks.

The latest Palos Verdes Peninsula slide may calve, and the main slide mass is likely to keep “moving oceanward.” That’s according to a preliminary draft of a geotechnical study commissioned by the City of Los Angeles in early winter, but that’s the extent of the news for now. The same report says based on the studies completed to date, the risk of landslide movement behind last November’s slide — landward into a nature preserve and beyond a new chain link fence — is low.

That’s just the latest from an area southwest of downtown L.A. that has been generating geological news for decades. According to a landslides map by the California Geological Survey, the PV Peninsula boasts 175 slides, 49 of them active.

Two studies, one published recently in Environmental Research Letters and another I reported on late last year by Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the U.S. Geological Survey, are predicting more frequent coastal flooding in California caused by rising sea levels and an increasing number of extreme Pacific storms that hit the coast.

Both trends could impact the PV Peninsula: one from above and the other at the base, according to Lisa Collins, a lecturer in environmental studies at USC. “There’s a potential for increased storm activity and storms cause a lot of erosion. The cliffs of Palos Verdes are eroding anyway.” Up top, the threat is from precipitation. When the volcanic layers of the peninsula weather or degrade due to rain, explains Collins, they morph into two kinds of very slippery clay. The clay stops the water, but the layers of earth above it get saturated and heavy.

Factor in another element: the Peninsula is an “uplift.” When the Pacific tectonic plate slammed into the North American plate, the earth folded into vertical layers, just like the hood of a car might accordion in an accident. Combine soft and saturated earth sitting on slippery clay, with an incline tipped toward the ocean, and you get the formula for these landslides.

Collins uses tilted slabs of plywood and sand castles to teach her students about the Peninsula’s geology. “You can take a bucket and fill it with some damp sand and invert it and it will stay standing. But if you artificially make it rain… the mixture essentially turns liquid and flows again. They can’t keep that steep angle… and we see a lot of those angles on the coast of California.”

Take an audio trip to the PV peninsula on Monday with The California Report, and hear from residents and scientists about this oceanside geology lesson.

Lincoln Else

President Nasheed at the Copenhagen Climate Summit 2009.

The new documentary, The Island President, depicts former-president Mohamed Nasheed’s efforts to draw the world’s attention to the plight of his country. The islands that make up the Maldives lie barely above sea level. With a few feet of sea level rise, they will be inundated.

John Shenk, the San Francisco-based director of the film, was a guest on KQED’s Forum last week. He talked about how Nasheed, the country’s first democratically-elected president (he resigned in February), and a former human rights campaigner, became a climate change activist.

“He took office and immediately plunged into the climate debate,” Shenk said. “He’s framing the climate debate as a human rights issue. He very much sees the climate fight, the struggle against climate change, as an extension of his fight for democracy.”

In a quote from the film, Nasheed explains: “When we came to power we thought we won the fight. After twenty years, we thought, ‘Look, OK, we’ll have a happy life.’ But we had our first few cabinet meetings, and most of the pending issues were climate change issues. Weather patterns are changing, and that’s having a very big impact on fisheries. We have lost a lot of the shoreline. Our islands are going to be flooded.”

Nasheed attended the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, where island nations banded together, hoping to pressure the larger countries into a deal to take action on reducing greenhouse gases and addressing climate change. That didn’t happen, but Shenk shows how Nasheed emerged as leader in the debate.

“Climate change is such a huge topic. I saw this as a chance to humanize the situation. Nasheed is a kind of one in a billion character,” Shenk said on Forum. “Whether about climate change or not, watching that kind of leadership is an amazing experience.”

The Island President begins screening in San Francisco tonight; the producer, Bonni Cohen will be there tonight and tomorrow night. It opens in Los Angeles, Berkeley, San Rafael and San Diego in April.