Arctic Coastal erosion: A review

Arctic permafrost coasts are known to make up a third of the coasts of the Earth and to undergo large erosion rates (Lantuit et al., 2011a). This erosion bears considerable threats for Arctic coastal infrastructure, planned or existing, and could result in the alteration of the coastal food web thro...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lantuit, Hugues, Overduin, Pier Paul, Wetterich, Sebastian
Format: Conference Object
Language:unknown
Published: 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/30700/
https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.39631
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Summary:Arctic permafrost coasts are known to make up a third of the coasts of the Earth and to undergo large erosion rates (Lantuit et al., 2011a). This erosion bears considerable threats for Arctic coastal infrastructure, planned or existing, and could result in the alteration of the coastal food web through the release of large quantities of organic carbon and nutrients to the near-shore zone (Forbes et al., 2011). Our knowledge of Arctic coastal erosion is often constrained by the capacity of research teams to collect information over several decades at the same location, which is necessary to cap-ture the inter-annual variability of the process and establish sig-nificant trends. Lantuit et al. (2011a) published a database with data on coastal erosion for close to 100 000 km of coast in the Arctic (25% of the total length of the Arctic permafrost coast-line), but the rates of erosion were generally computed for one time period only, which limits the use of the dataset to look at temporal trends of erosion. In this paper, we look at publica-tions released over the past six years on coastal erosion to pro-vide a circum-Arctic update on rates of erosion and on process knowledge.