Coastal and Marine Dynamics

Coastal and marine dynamics examines how shorelines, seafloors, and the water column respond to forces like waves, tides, sediment movement, and rising seas — processes that unfold over timescales ranging from a single storm to centuries of gradual change. As sea levels climb and extreme weather events intensify, understanding where and how fast coastlines erode, accrete, or migrate has direct consequences for hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal zones. Researchers are actively working to improve wave and sediment transport models that can capture the feedback between human interventions — such as seawalls, beach nourishment, and dredging — and natural dynamics that often respond in unexpected ways. A central open question is how to reliably project shoreline change at local scales when global climate models operate at resolutions too coarse to resolve the fine-grained processes that actually move sand and reshape coastlines.

Works

93,726

Total citations

1,026,415

Keywords

Coastal DynamicsSea-Level RiseShoreline ChangeWave ModelingCoastal VulnerabilityBeach Erosion