Erosion/Accretion Reversal in the Late 1960s

The discovery at the LTER site on Hog Island of a reversal in the direction of shoreline change has since been shown to be true from New Jersey's coast to Florida's. It is not local to the VCR and thus we believe its cause to be a large scale processes. Places that had been eroding started to build seaward and building places switched to erosion. This applies to about 2/3 of the 1500 kilometers of coast studied. (sorry about the poor quality of the scanned graphics). This regional exploration of the NSF LTER finding was funded by FEMA and the lead in that study was Michael Fenster of the University of Virginia.

Some detail on the histograms. Using data every 50 meters along the coast for the last five decades we determined when the reversals for erosion to accretion or accretion to erosion happened. We counted the number of locations that changed each year. While there was some variation from place to place we found that most places changed in the late 1960s. The peak in the histograms are around this date.