12 scary claims about the beach sand ‘crisis’

Ocean City, N.J., visitors enjoying the beach on Memorial Day, May 27, 2013, despite a huge pipe used to dredge in sand. (MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer)

POSTED: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2014, 11:15 AM


As New Jersey keeps working to rebuild and protect beaches assaulted by Superstorm Sandy, a former Rutgers history professor argues that the shorelines are getting increasingly tough to save.

And not just because sea levels may be rising due to climate change.

Two years ago, John R. Gillis, author of The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History, issued a warning in an op-ed titled “Life and death of the beach” in the New York Times:
“Death no longer haunts the shore in the form of broken ships and rotting whales — for it is the beach itself that could be dying.”

Gillis, who now splits his time between the Northern California and Maine coasts, laid out the case in greater detail Wednesday in a new op-ed, “Why sand is disappearing.”

Here are a dozen excerpts about what he calls a “global beach-quality sand shortage,” which has produced a “sand rush” and even a “sand mafia.”

1. “Beaches are the most transitory of landscapes, and sand beaches the most vulnerable of all.”

2. “75 to 90 percent of the world’s natural sand beaches are disappearing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of shores.”

3. “The extent of this global crisis is obscured because so-called beach nourishment projects attempt to hold sand in place and repair the damage by the time summer people return.”

4. “In recent decades, East Coast barrier islands have used 23 million loads of sand, much of it mined inland and the rest dredged from coastal waters.”

5. “The sand and gravel business is now growing faster than the economy as a whole.”

6. “As demand has risen — and the damming of rivers has held back the flow of sand from mountainous interiors — natural sources of sand have been shrinking.”

7. “One might think that desert sand would be a ready substitute, but its grains are finer and smoother ... and tend to blow away.”

8. “There is a global beach-quality sand shortage, caused by the industries that have come to rely on it.”

9. “The Midwest has produced what is being called a “sand rush” there, more than doubling regional sand pit mining since 2009.”

10. “Concrete still takes 80 percent of all that mining can deliver.”

11. “In India, where the government has stepped in to limit sand mining along its shores, illegal mining operations by what is now referred to as the ‘sand mafia’ defy these regulations.”

12. “Glass and concrete can be recycled back into sand, but there will never be enough to meet the demand of every resort.”

From “Why sand is disappearing.”

Contact staff writer Peter Mucha at 215-854-4342 or pmucha@phillynews.com. Follow @petemucha on Twitter.

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