Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Beach Houses to Go

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MILLIONS of dollars worth of luxury waterfront homes at Byron Bay will be demolished in the name of climate change following a council decision to enshrine “planned retreat” in law.  Read more here.

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  1. janama says

    To understand what’s going on here you have to understand how the beaches down the east coast are formed and where the sand comes from.

    The sand comes from the sandstone cliffs of Sydney that have been pounded by waves. The eastern currents wash the sand northwards all the way to Fraser Island, a sand island, where it eventually drops into the deep ocean on the northern tip of the island.

    During high tides the ocean takes the sand out to sea then dumps it back again further north – this has been going on for thousands of years. If you build a projection out into the ocean the currents will cause the north side of the projection to erode more than normal as you can witness at all the river mouths up the coast where they have built breakwaters to allow boats to enter the rivers. The unique surfing waves of Kirra Beach were recently destroyed (much to the anger of the locals) by the council dredging the sand blocking the mouth of the Tweed river which was caused by the sand trying to get around the projection on it’s way up the coast.

    http://www.usyd.edu.au/marine/staff/cowell/projects/bypass/byron/byron.htm

    These sand pulses moving up the coast are normal. I watched it happen many times when I lived on the same beachfront further north. Overnight the dunes would be washed away and you’d find you had to drop 15ft from the dune to the beach yet within 6 months all the sand had returned and the dunes were back to normal. The sand was returned by the tides washing it back in, albeit further north, plus the constant SE winds would literally blow it back up against the dunes.

    here’s a typical washout as occurred recently in the Illawarra

    http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/multimedia/images/full/530251.jpg

    Unfortunately Byron Bay is home to many warmanistas who clearly see this as evidence of AGW and rising sea levels and therefore the wealthy home owners of Belongil must pay the penance for their environmental sin of wishing to live by the sea.

  2. spangled drongo says

    There appears to be absolutely no visible indication of AGW causing problems on our coastline.
    Storms? yes. Erosion? yes. King tides? yes. But this is simply BAU that has been happening forever.
    This Byron Council are using AGW to duck their responsibilities.

    janama, I agree with what you say about the process but going back earlier with Kirra Point, the old beach was similar to the present before the Tweed walls were extended and when this was done [about 1970] Kirra lost it’s beach and the “legendary” point break existed until the Tweed sand by-pass system was recently installed which improved the Tweed bar as well as all the beaches in Qld to the north.
    The full story is incredibly long and tortuous but it essentially is the saga of a responsible council [Gold Coast] looking after its waterfront property owners and beaches in the face of great adversity which the Byron Council could sure learn a thing or two from.

  3. janama says

    thanks for that correction on Kirra spangled – I thought it was the other way around. 🙂

  4. Louis His ssink says

    Just a historical point – I was part of a rutile-zircon exploration effort off Tweed Heads during 1969-70 looking for beach sand deposits offshore (6 fathoms) and found them under the old strand lines out to sea. Stayed at the Tweed Heads motel on the corner, occasionly dined at a fish restaurant at Tugun, and admired Mark Foyster’s Mercedes 600 when it appeared at the wharf where the drilling vessel was moored.

    Beach erosion then was a real problem, and also at the parents home in Narrabeen near the SLSC at the end of Ocean Street. Some years the sands disappear, then, almost magically, reappear.

    It bears pointing out that the Narrabeen peninsula, (north of Sydney) is the result of a recent uplift or drop in sea level, the older shoreline being the bottom of the Collaroy Cliffs inland.

    Port Jackson is also a drowned river system that was “suddenly” inundated by the ingress of the sea – why remains a bit of a mystery, though given that it’s smack in the middle of the Sydney Basin, a sedimentary basin hosting vast coal and gas deposits, I suspect the subsidence might be due to mantle degassing under the basin (refer to Russian-Ukrainian theory on oil) causing the land to sink, rather than the ocean to rise (if that is a sensible statement).

    Science is fun – new information tends to cause older interpretations to be cast out for better ones, unlike religions which never ever change their dogmas.

  5. spangled drongo says

    Louis, interesting stuff. Those Tweed training walls were probably extended in the late ’60s, not 1970 like I said earlier. They forced all that conveyor belt of coastal sand drift offshore about where you were looking. Mark Foyster would have been right on to it.

    The trouble with the AGW “science” and religion is that you get the worst of both worlds.
    Something I read recently:
    “I slept with faith and found her a corpse in my arms, I danced and drank with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning”.