Photographing An Island™
A Van Lieu Photography Blog

‘Sconset Bluff Erosion Seen From ‘Sconset Beach

Saturday, I returned to ‘Sconset beach. It was a beautiful sunny day. I waited for a period of low tide to make it safe to venture into this area of the beach as there is no way to quickly exit. I haven’t been down in this part of the beach for 9 days and I was amazed to see how much has fallen in that time. There was a great deal of top soil and clay that had fallen in large clumps and more of the mid-sections of the bluff have become sheer drops. One has to be extremely cautious as there are areas of the bluff that are unstable and there isn’t much room to get out of the way of a slide on the narrow beach.

While I was on the beach photographing, Dirck attended a seminar about erosion in the Nantucket and Cape Cod area given by Dr. Fred Ehrlich, Dr. Graham Giese, and Dr. Sarah Oktay.

I put this in a slide show form so you can see larger pictures than what the blog format allows.

Click here for the slide show

Pretty scary with that house. Same problem here, I read an article just this weekend about someone who has to leave his house. Can’t sell it -obviously-, can’t be insured, -obviously-, so what now?

Some say it’s nature’s revenge for having built so close to the shore.

These houses didn’t start out so close. There used to be a football field length from the bottom edge of the bluff to the water. The beach went first, and now the bluff itself. This happens around Nantucket, sand is taken from one beach and deposited on another. The bluff is a different matter. It was created by a glacier so when it goes, it won’t be rebuilt. I was stunned to see the changes in less than two weeks.

Thanks for commenting, Ciel!

Sharon

Great presentation Sharon, glad to see you put the photographs to mentionable use. Stay safe in those dangerous areas.

Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that! It has been a consuming project lately. Safety has to be a big concern whether on top of the bluff or underneath.

Sharon

A football field is what we call too close here! A law has been voted in 1986 to avoid building within a minimum of one kilometre from the seashore…

We’d all be huddled in the middle of the island with that law. Nantucket is less than 4 miles across.

Sharon

Okay… excepting islands, lol! One off the French coast will probably have disappeared in 50 years…