A startling new national report that uses computer imaging to flag the effects of global warming on the Massachusetts coast shows that the south shore of the Vineyard will be washed away and downtown Edgartown will be a swamp in 50 years — even if the most conservative projections about rising sea levels are correct.
The report was issued yesterday by the National Environmental Trust (NET), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group based in Washington, D.C.
At a public meeting online Thursday afternoon, engineering consultants will present the findings from their study of Edgartown's vulnerability to sea level rise and storm surge.
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.
Following a category two hurricane or a 50-year coastal storm, Beach Road and Eastville avenue would likely be buried under water, and the only remaining access to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital in Oak Bluffs would be Temahigan Road, according to preliminary results of a risk assessment study prepared by an independent consultant.
But even under a worst-case storm scenario, the actual hospital facility would avoid major flooding, the preliminary study suggests.
The irony of Oak Bluffs is that people so loved its beaches, they set about destroying them.
They built so close to the ocean’s edge they had to defend their development with a seawall. And the seawall prevented the natural replenishment of the sand, so the beach eroded away.
