Excerpt: ‘California Against the Sea’

The California coast grew and prospered during a remarkable moment in history when the sea was at its tamest. The Beach Boys crooned of crimson sunsets and golden dawns, woodies, and palm trees in the sand. Laguna Beach and Malibu sparkled white, their wide, sandy beaches dotted with seashells at low tide and surf shacks mere steps from the sea. Wooden piers staked each city’s claim along the 1,200-mile shore, which beckoned to the millions who came west and felt the ocean calling.

But the mighty Pacific, unbeknownst to all, was nearing its final years of a gentle but unusual cycle that had lulled dreaming settlers into a deceptive endless summer.

Elsewhere, Miami has been drowning, Louisiana shrinking, North Carolina’s beaches disappearing like a time lapse with no ending. Venice, Italy, keeps going underwater, and Indonesians are fleeing their own capital. While other regions have been grappling with destructive waves and rising seas, the West Coast for decades was spared thanks to a rare confluence of favorable climate patterns. Much of California’s coastal development coincided with the calmest period of an ocean-atmosphere cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, during which generous winds pulled warmer water offshore, leaving the water along the coast much cooler and less expansive. This “sea level rise suppression,” as scientists call it, kept huge storms in check and the rate of sea rise below the global average. It was with this fortuitous blessing that developers, blinded from the consequences of a warming planet, paved over sand dunes and wetlands, river plains and streams—making more land out of these ancient ecosystems that buffer true land from sea. New roads and rail lines made way for more people to reach the ocean. Seaside cottages morphed into glass mansions. Californians, captivated by this unconquered coast, kept building right to the water’s edge.

But lines in the sand are meant to shift. In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California; by the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 6, possibly 7 feet.

Such a dramatic rise in water might still seem far off for some California towns, but on that winter morning in Imperial Beach, the end of the century felt near. Mark Merrifield, who heads the Scripps Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation, could barely sleep the night before he and [Laura] Engeman bundled up, grabbed their equipment, and sought a high enough vantage point to monitor the sea. Planting himself firmly on the apartment balcony, he couldn’t help but marvel at all the forces at play. He has devoted much of his life to studying the ocean’s shifts and rise, but, he said, “the whole societal infrastructure of the coast is built on the premise that sea level doesn’t change.” Wildfire and drought dominate the climate change debates in the state, yet this less-talked-about reality has California cornered. The coastline is eroding with every tide and storm, but everything built before we knew better—Pacific Coast Highway, the rail line to San Diego, entire communities by the sea—is fixed in place with nowhere to go.

As a student in the 1980s at Scripps, one of the world’s oldest and largest centers for ocean and atmospheric research, Merrifield was fascinated by how waves and currents shaped the coastline. His research took him to Australia, where he studied circulation and variability of the Great Barrier Reef, then to the University of Hawai‘i, where for two decades as the director of the Sea Level Center, he monitored how the world’s oceans have changed—and continue to change. He deepened his field research in Guam, Saipan, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands before finding himself back in California, analyzing the very first coast that altered his sense of permanence.

Merrifield said he didn’t start out with a climate focus, but once he pieced together so many signs of impending disaster, it was impossible not to adjust gears and start looking for solutions. A soft-spoken scientist whose eyes often crinkle with a warm smile, Merrifield speaks with an understated directness when he thinks about the future. He’s heard it all and there’s no debate. “Sea level rise is the heart of climate change,” he said. “That’s where all the heat is going: into the ocean.”

The ocean, indeed, has long been the silent hero in this burning world. It has absorbed almost one-third of the carbon dioxide released by humans since the Industrial Revolution and more than 90 percent of the resulting heat—helping the air we breathe at the expense of a souring sea. Warm water, put simply, expands, whereas cold water takes up less space. And when carbon dioxide mixes with seawater, it undergoes chemical reactions that increase the water’s acidity. If we treat Earth as our most ailing patient, the symptoms are right here in the water.•

Join us on Thursday, July 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Rosanna Xia will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. Register for the Zoom conversation here.