The New York Sea Grant is offering new assistance to bluff and coastline erosion.
Sandy beaches and gentle shorelines are not the typical landscape for Great Lakes shores. Instead, rocky terrains and bluffs line the lake. For Roy Widrig, a Great Lakes Coastal Processes and Hazard Specialist for New York Sea Grant, these bluffs represent a larger historical process — erosion.
“These bluffs have been continually eroding for a very long time, I mean we are talking thousands of years here,” Widrig said.
Widrig said even if properties are experiencing erosion, owners should not be too worried.
“We don’t want people to panic when they do see erosion happening,” Widrig said.
Widrig and his colleague Kathleen Fallon recently published a new guide aimed at bluff formation and erosion processes and how to monitor and report bluff erosion. Widrig said the guide was the result of an influx of erosion-related inquiries following increased erosion during harsh flood years in 2017 and 2019.
“So we received a lot of questions from people,” Widrig said. “How can we kind of temper this erosion, how can we slow it down, or how can we use this process as a way to conserve shoreline instead of continuing hardening them with rock riprap walls and cement seawalls?”
While it is not possible to reverse the erosion process, Widrig said this is not all bad.
“We are probably not going to get the bluffs back in any way, there is no process for that to happen,” Widrig said. “But the loss of those bluffs is actually sustaining other coastal features like wetland barrier bars and beaches.”
The New York Sea Grant offers in-person and virtual assistance for inquiries regarding coastline concerns. The new guide can be found here: https://seagrant.sunysb.edu/Images/Uploads/PDFs/Marine-GreatLakes-Erosion-NYsCoastalBluffs.pdf.
