Coastlines

People living on coastlines might lose their homes, and cities might be completely submerged.

Cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

For decades scientists warned that the accelerating sea level rise would eventually put coastlines in many countries at risk.

Many locations, despite being situated near coastlines, have fairly extreme climates.

The Great African Sea Forest stretches for 1,300 kilometers, or just over 800 miles, along South Africa and Namibia’s coastlines.

“Are we really going to want to build a huge amount of infrastructure to protect coastlines that we really cannot protect? Are we going to want to set up sewage systems that, in fact, will be overwhelmed by ocean rise? We have a whole series of things which are going to be controversial because people live there now and they're going to want that infrastructure to protect them.”

Louisiana has been hardest hit by the disaster, but oil residue is continuing to spread elsewhere in the Gulf to fragile coastlines, coating wildlife in a black ooze and threatening the livelihoods of fishermen and other business owners.

The group says the ocean is littered with 150 million metric tons of plastic trash, clogging coastlines, ensnaring wildlife and even littering land far from any human settlement.

If you were a sailor before the invention of modern navigational equipment, lighthouses were treasured beacons for wandering seafarers. They once dotted U.S. coastlines. But with advances in navigation equipment, lighthouses have become obsolete and many are no longer used for navigational purposes by major shipping traffic. Many lighthouses are threatened by changes in geography due to erosion and natural disasters, are vandalized, or are in desperate need of repair.