This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The cliffs that comprise much of California's coastline are constantly being reshaped by rain, waves and other geologic forces. The erosion of cliffs threatens critical infrastructure such as highways, railways, homes, parklands, public access points and more.
Therefore, it is important to monitor and track change occurring along the coast. Previous cliff erosion rates were a decade old. To address this issue, researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography collected new airborne lidar in 2023 and developed new approaches to map cliff erosion and retreat.
Using these approaches, they measured how California's coastal cliffs changed between 2016 and 2023 and found that change was highly uneven. In some cliff retreat hot spots, the area of land loss over the seven-year period exceeded 800 dump-truck loads for every yard (0.91 meters) of shoreline. Their findings, published in the journal International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, improve the understanding of California's coastal geology and provide a framework for systematic statewide cliff monitoring.
And with a strong El Niño expected to threaten the California coastline this winter, understanding the health of California's cliffs and erosion hot spots can help with coastal management and preparation. California's coastal cliffs are of great interest to both scientists and the public. Roughly 70% of the California coast is made up of coastal cliffs.
In addition to threatening coastal infrastructure and public resources, cliff collapse poses a serious threat to beachgoers, so monitoring erosion has become a priority for the state. "The cliffs are not stable. They erode and collapse over time," said Danghan Xie, an assistant professor and coastal geomorphologist at the University of Maryland and lead author of the study, who did the research while a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps.
"We've seen many sad news stories about fatal cliff landslides. It's unpredictable and a significant hazard to the coastal community." Addressing these safety and infrastructure issues requires a better understanding of how California's coastline is changing and how geologic processes affect it. California's coastal cliffs had previously been surveyed from airplanes using lidar in 2016.
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