Thursday 27 March 2008

The Shoreline Management Plan

Back to my notes on high tides and global warming, here in Thanet we can expect to be seriously effected by rising sea levels. So how much can we expect the sea to rise, well to start with the land is sinking by about 0.8 mm per year for geological reasons related to the last ice age. The latest predictions for the rise in sea level in this area are 1990 to 2025 4 mm per year 2025 to 2055 8.5 mm per year 2055 to 2085 12 mm per year.

So by 2085 the land will have sunk by 61.6 mm and the sea risen by 640 mm giving a total rise in level of 700 mm about 27 inches. Combined with this we can expect much stormier winters.

What this means to us here in Thanet, first and foremost, is that the low-lying ground that was once the Wantsum Sea Channel that separated us from mainland Britain is vulnerable to the sea flooding back in and washing away the land.

For our two main towns Margate and Ramsgate the areas around the harbours and main beaches will be more liable to flooding and storm damage.

Those places where the cliffs are not protected by a concrete promenade will be subject to greater cliff erosion.

I would recommend reading The Shoreline Management Plan especially appendix C it makes for rather disturbing reading. Click here to read it

1 comment:

  1. Its the 'no intervention' section that worries me.

    I suppose they have to consider the consequences of not doing repairs to the sea defences at *all* the possible places around the coast. However, *hypothetical* questions like 'what happens if we don't maintain Ramsgate Harbour' tend to leave me a bit uneasy.

    Fred

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.