Climate Change...there, I said it

The "Keeling Curve" - atmospheric CO2 in the modern era (since 1958). These data underpin one of the lines of evidence that contemporary rising CO2 concentrations are due primarily to human activities.

It seemed like spring was all about climate change, and particularly various efforts around the Olympic Peninsula aimed at preparing for projected changes. I wrapped up two different climate change projects, a large climate impact assessment for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, and another that I was a contributor for - a community impact assessment for the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe. I am pretty proud of this last one - not only did I get to work with some truly phenomenal partners from Adaptation International and the Jamestown Tribe, but I am also proud to have participated in this first comprehensive community assessment to take place in coastal Washington outside of Puget Sound. Another notable event was the Clallam MRC's workshop on ocean acidification, which focused on current and future "acidification" of local marine waters, driven by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

It seems to me that media reporting on climate change has turned a corner of sorts, and I feel that I've seen far more reporting this spring on science and assessment of global climate change. This Reuters article from today on a Nature Geoscience paper is a good example. It suggests that climate models most extreme projections (i.e. on the high end of their uncertainty) regarding atmospheric warming may be too high...seems like a positive, right? But the reason - that the oceans seem to be absorbing more heat than expected, has local ramifications. Even small increases in ocean temperature may have observable impacts including shifts in the range of marine species, and reduced productivity due to increasing stratification between the warmer surface layer and the colder water below it.

The data that set off the 400 ppm media blitz - CO2 concentration measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii

Another notable item from May - the symbolic reaching of the 400 ppm mark in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory that generated quite a bit of media attention. Both the figure at the top of this post, as well as the one just above are atmospheric CO2 concentration data from Mauna Loa. While there is certainly still debate regarding what this threshold means and how we, as a society, should view it, I find it compelling to think about the context: CO2 levels have not been this high certainly since Homo sapiens has been around (see figure below), and pre-date many of our fore-bearers as well. The last time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations appear to have exceeded 400 ppm was during the Pliocene > 2 million years ago.

These data, from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and posted to www.climatecentral.org, suggest that the current level of atmospheric CO2 is anamalous over the 800,000 year record available by analyzing gases trapped in ice.

In light of this context, it seems worthwhile to at the very least bring the very best science to bear on the problem of projecting future climate, and use that information to plan for those changes. The OCNMS Sanctuary Advisory Committee discussed that very problem at their meeting on Friday, and I see leaders all over the Olympic Peninsula and in Washington State doing the same. I focus on the coastal implications of climate change - and there are many. One of the areas that I am interested in at the moment is the ways in which climate change, primarily through sea level rise and changes in storm pattens and wave climate, may compromise the ability of shorelines to act as effective barriers between communities and the ocean. To that end I've proposed a small shoreline monitoring program for the North Olympic Peninsula, to complement shoreline change data collected in SW Washington and Oregon. I put together the poster below on the program - check it out and let me know what you think...

The Olympic Coast Clean-up 2013: Preliminary Observations

Styrofoam...an increasingly common component of the intertidal ecosystem of the world's coastlines.

Initial estimates from this year's Olympic Coast Cleanup suggest that approximately 15 tons of debris were pulled off of Washington's beaches. A staggering amount, but definitely not a huge increase over previous years. One of the hypotheses out there regarding the potential of increased volumes of debris related to the Tohoku tsunami is that we would see spikes in these clean-up data...and that doesn't appear to be the case this year.

...and the other part of the modern beach, the plastic beverage bottle

This year's clean-up provided the same inspiring examples of community care and investment in the condition of Washington's outer coast. People came from all over the state (and out of the state), made a weekend of it, and dedicated hours and energy to pulling everything from chunks of styrofoam to 50 kg tires off of wilderness beaches. For the past few years I've worked the registration station at Three Rivers, serving beaches north and south of La Push. Many of the faces showing up to register have become familiar, and learning the stories of the people that come to the clean-up is one of the reasons that I love this event so much.

a local contribution to marine debris...likely from commercial fishing off of Washington's coast

Like last year I tried to get a sense of what was pulled off of those beaches in order to assess the degree to which patterns of debris are changing. Again, I was primarily interested in the "production rate" of those beaches, so like last year I turned to data collected by volunteers as they worked the beaches. We totaled 118 volunteers on "our" beaches this year (again: Rialto, First, Second and Third), and based on their estimates each volunteer averaged 19 pounds of debris, with a standard deviation of 14 pounds. Using the standard deviation as a measure of the uncertainty, I use that to estimate a total of 2280±1650 pounds collected over 6.6 miles of beach. On a per mile of beach basis (which is the metric that we attempted to use in our scenario development for the possible impact of tsunami debris), this equates to 0.17±0.12 tons/miles. We've estimated the "baseline" (i.e. before the tsunami debris) debris delivery to the beaches of Washington to be about 0.5 tons/mile. So this is another line of evidence to suggest that the Tohoku tsunami has not led to a significant and sustained spike in the amount of debris making landfall on the beach.

more fishing debris

That being said, its almost certain that some of the debris that was pulled off of the beach was, indeed, "tsunami debris". The first photo of this post shows a sub-sample of the styrofoam bits pulled off of Rialto Beach. There has been much speculation that pulses of styrofoam that made landfall in Washington starting last summer were derived at least in part from insulation material - from homes, businesses and other structures - released into the ocean by the destructive power of the tsunami. This material is particularly worrisome because it breaks apart fairly easily and some suspect has ecological impacts out of proportion with its relatively low mass. We don't know if there is more styrofoam this year than in previous years since those sorts of information aren't tracked carefully.

one of the finds of the day - a huge chunk of styrofoam that appeared to have been a part of an old dock or structure. Chunks of concrete were attached to it.

Another very cool part of this year's clean-up, and one that will hopefully provide much more detailed information on the mass and composition of debris recovered, was the work of a group of Western Washington University students at a selection of beaches (including Third Beach). As part of a project funded by the North Pacific Coast Marine Resource Committee they focused on carefully sorting and weighing debris.

students from Huxley College of Environmental Studies carefully sorted and measured much of the debris off of selected beaches as part of a project funded by the North Pacific Coast Marine Resource Committee

A view of the dumpster at the trailhead of Third Beach near the end of the day

Preliminary results from a Ledgewood Slide survey

The ProMark 200 RTK-DGPS system used for this survey leaning one one of the uplifted scarps along the edge of the slide. Those gravels on top of the scarp are the former high intertidal surface, uplifted 2-3 meters.

The Ledgewood Slide on Whidbey Island on March 27th was large enough to destroy at least one house and prompt the evacuation of more, and also to generate at least a blip on the national news scene. Bluffs are a predominant shore type in Washington State, and their failure - whether slow and creeping or large and catastrophic - is one of the many hazards that coastal residents of this state are subject to. Bluff erosion and failure is sort of a double-edged sword though - while a hazard to human infrastructure, the sediment supplied to beaches by bluff erosion is thought to be a building block for beaches and complex coastal habitats. As a result there can be tension between the desire to stabilize bluffs with armoring or other tools, and allow them to erode to support habitat restoration goals. In light of sea level rise projections, climate change projections related to increasing winter precipitation, and on-going construction of infrastructure on coastal bluffs it is likely that this tension will only amplify in the decades ahead.

Rebekah Sexton and Diana McCandless from WA DOE's CMAP program - about to get wet and collect more topography data than you can imagine.

For all of these reasons understanding how, when and why bluffs erode, and what sort of contribution they make to the coastal sediment budget are important research objectives in Washington. The Ledgewood slide, because of its scale and the deep-seated nature of the slide, generated significant interest amongst the small community of coastal geologists, geomorphologists, managers and others who think about these sorts of problems every day (see these two other blog posts on the slide, one by Dan McShane, and the other by the venerable Hugh Shipman, as well as the Washington DNR's Preliminary Report on the slide). As a result I carved aside a day (2 April 2013, six days after the slide) to join a few others from the WA DOE Coastal Monitoring and Analysis Program to investigate the slide. While the DOE staff (Rebekah Sexton and Diana McCandless) focused on collecting high resolution topography data on the beaches adjacent to the slide for post-processing, I decided to focus on collecting real-time topography data on the slide itself. I had two goals: 1) Add to the baseline data set that will allow us to track the evolution of the toe of the slide over time as it interacts with waves and tides, and 2) quantify the volume of sediment delivered to the coastal zone by the slide. Here I am providing some of the preliminary results and analysis from that short survey. To reiterate though, this is just a taster. Others are collecting reams of data and providing insight that should deliver an enhanced perspective on the slide.

The former log line from the high beach, uplifted to approximately 4 m above MHHW.

First, a bit on methods. All of these survey data were collected with a Peninsula College-owned Ashtech ProMark 200 RTK-DGPS system (PM200) on a survey pole (see photo above), receiving corrections through the Washington State Reference Network. Its always ideal to validate the RTK survey data against some other independent spatial data, preferably a monument with good published control. In this instance though there were no monuments adjacent to the site. As an alternative the PM200 survey data were compared to aerial LIDAR collected in 2001-2002 for the area around the slide, and available through the Puget Sound Lidar Consortium. Near the slide site 20-30 points were surveyed along a surface (the road leading down to the parking area north of the slide) that I though was likely there in 2001-2002, highly visible to the LIDAR sensor, and probably fairly stable over that 11 year intervening period. These 20-30 survey points were compared to the nearest individual LIDAR return and the measured elevations differenced to generate this distribution:

So this was good - an average 6 cm offset suggested that the PM200 and the LIDAR from 2001 were relatively close in the vertical...good enough for the purposes of this preliminary survey.

I focused on trying to collect cross-shore profiles from the water line as high as I could get on the slide, both adjacent to and on the slide, and then compared each to the 2001-2002 LIDAR data. Here is an example from a site in the middle of the slide (others are given at the end of this post):

As it turned out I was unable to survey high enough on the slide (due to vegetation) to get over the pre-slide surface (the LIDAR data). The slide toe was pushed 60-80 m seaward and so all of the areas I was surveying on the toe were over formerly sub-tidal or lower intertidal surfaces, and to make matters worse the 2001-2002 LIDAR in this area was collected during relatively high water - somewhere around 1.5 m above MLLW. Needing a pre-slide surface to calculate vertical changes against I turned to Dave Finlayson's Puget Sound DEM (also shown in the figure above). As is clear, though, this is a relatively coarse (10 m horizontal resolution) DEM and only roughly models the actual surface in the area of the slide.

Despite the coarse resolution of the Finlayson DEM it was the best available surface for most of the survey extent. Here are how all of the survey data compare to the DEM:

You can see from this map how I was unable to survey over the former beach surface along most of the slide. For comparison sake here is the comparison to the 2001 LIDAR data:

Since these LIDAR data were collected at relatively high water the only survey points that I collected that overlapped were on the upper beach adjacent to the slide.

Total volume contributed to the coastal zone? Well, kind of hard to get at with these data since I wasn't able to survey to the former MHHW contour and didn't have high resolution bathymetry to work with, not to mention how sparse my survey data were. However, based on the footprint of the slide now in the coastal zone (an estimated 21,260 m2 based on my preliminary survey), and assuming a mean difference between my survey data and the pre-slide surface (a loosely estimated 6 m based on eyeballing the profiles below), I estimate a contribution to the coastal zone (defined here as the area seaward of the former MHHW contour) of ~128,000 m3 of sediment. This is a VERY rough estimate (noting that a better estimate should come later from the higher resolution data collected by WA DOE), but if its close it represents a significant volumetric contribution to the intertidal zone. However, based on observations made of the slide it seemed to be composed of a large fraction of mud and silt which is unlikely to remain on the beach. And, of course, it remains to be seen if and how long it takes Puget Sound to redistribute this sediment.

Of course, one of the more interesting things about this slide was not necessarily its extent, or the volume it contributed to the coastal zone, but in how it slid, and the forms associated with it. I shot this video to try to capture some of the interesting features of the toe of the slide:

and here are the remaining profiles...all ten of them. If you are interested in my raw survey data email me at immiller@uw.edu and I can get them to you.

The Removal of Washington's Misawa Dock

Today Steve Fradkin from Olympic National Park and I presented a well-attended Studium Generale lecture at Peninsula College in Port Angeles - on marine debris in general and "tsunami debris" in particular. While I babbled on trying to provide some background and context to tsunami debris Steve focused on the implications and removal of the Misawa dock that washed up in Olympic National Park. The Misawa dock gets its name from its point of origin, in Misawa Japan:

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The harbor from which the Misawa docks originated. Of four docks, one did not leave Misawa Harbor, one was recovered on the coast of Oregon, and one was spotted off of Hawaii but subsequently lost.

My favorite part...this great time lapse of the multi-day removal of the dock from the remote beach south of Mosquito Creek. Check it out:

The time lapse makes removal look easy, no?

A bit more on using oceanographic moorings as an educational tool

A light and temperature measuring HOBO attached to the top of a surface float destined for the waters off-shore of the Elwha River delta. Photo by Cordell Johnson, USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center Marine Facility

Oh how I do love HOBOs. If it isn't really clear yet, I am really a fan of these things. Cheap, robust and adaptable - perfect for the sort of low-budget science that I seem to end up involved in. A few months back I wrote a little story about a project that I had my Peninsula College Introduction to Oceanography class do, using HOBOs as the sensors on oceanographic moorings that we deployed in Port Angeles Harbor. While cheap, that project still had costs - primarily the few hundred dollars that we needed to buy the HOBOs themselves. Those costs were paid through a grant managed by the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center and the Feiro Marine Life Center, as well as through a donation made directly by Onset, the company that makes HOBOs.

As a project wrap-up, Eliza Dawson (one of the students from my class) and I just published an article in Onset's newsletter on the project, with a focus on how to apply this sort of activity in a classroom setting.

KRABS: Kelp Rocks Along Beaches

A "kelp rock"

In 2009 I posted about observations of kelp-mediated clast transport (essentially non-buoyant kelps attaching to cobble in the shallow sub-tidal zone, and subsequently being transported apparently due to the increased drag of the kelp) in the Elwha coastal zone. These observations stayed with me as I wrapped up my dissertation and started with Washington Sea Grant. It didn't take long for an opportunity to arise to look further into how important this mechanism of sediment transport really is. With Dan Lieberman at the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center I developed the KRABS (Kelp Rocks Along BeacheS) project, which was designed to fit in with existing projects that Dan's students' lead that look at marine debris and dead birds on local beaches. The essential idea behind the KRABS project is that students are quantifying the delivery of kelp-attached rocks to beaches on the Elwha delta and Dungeness Spit every month - at this point we have almost two years of data!

Karsten Turrey, a student at the Skills Center who has worked on the project, recently put together an essay titled, "Something Kelpish Going On"...

"Students on the Olympic Peninsula are conducting real-world research at the Elwha River to discover the marine environment, local beaches and themselves. In this blog post I will explain a little about what a kelp rock survey is, why kelp rock surveys are done, and where, when and how the surveys are done.

Some of the crew surveying the beach (from left, Hunter Baker, David Harwell, Karsten Turrey, Dan Lieberman and Conan McCarty).

Kelp is any large, brown, cold-water seaweed, it is not the small green seaweed. It grows in the cold water any where from 2 meters to over 30 meters along the Pacific Coast. A few of the species of kelp common in this area are Alaria marginata “Winged Kelp”, Cymathere triplicata, Nereocystis leutkeana “Bull Kelp” and Pterygophora. The part of the kelp that is attached to the rock is called the “holdfast.” Here is the history of kelp rock surveys on the Olympic Peninsula. The first person to want to do the surveys around here was Ian Miller, the University of Washington, Sea Grant Coastal Hazard Specialist. The first kelp rock survey and protocol on the Peninsula conducted by the North Olympic Natural Resources students was done on the 15th of March, 2011.

A kelp rock survey is where you have a team of people that comb the beach looking for rocks that have kelp attached to them. The group measures the size of the rock, gathers the GPS location, photographs the rock and kelp, determines what type of kelp it is and the condition the kelp is in (old, fresh). Kelp rock surveys are done to see how much of the sediment or rock which has washed up onto the shoreline are from the kelp and if this amount of sediment dragged up has an impact on the shoreline.

Surveys are done monthly on various beaches by Natural Resources students. The surveys are done along beaches. Here on the Olympic Peninsula, my Natural Resources class and I do them along the East Elwha Beach and the West Elwha Beach. Other students of Natural Resources Options Class do the same surveys along the Dungeness Spit in Sequim. There are 4 reaches at each of the Elwha Beaches. There is one reach at the Dungeness Spit. A reach is defined as a length of beach between any two points. For our surveys Ian Miller determined the reaches. We always start with reach 1, but if we finish reach 1, we roll a die and the number it lands on is the next reach we do, if it lands on 1,5 or 6 we roll again. It is important to have materials and procedures ready before starting the kelp rock survey, then we start walking the beach. When we find a kelp rock we put the ruler down to provide scale and take a picture of the rock. After the picture, we measure the rock size on the 3 axes, smallest, intermediate and largest, then we get the GPS location and then identify what type of kelp. We cut the kelp off of the rock so we do not recount it next time we survey.

During my class, October was the time of year we found the most kelp rocks. In one survey my class found over 90 kelp rocks in a small length of shore-line, around 100 yards. I think this is because the fall has stormy weather and rougher currents so it dragged more to shore, or maybe the life cycle of the kelp also has a role to play in it.

It is a very exciting project that I am glad I got to be a part of and I hope that future students can be a part of it as well. Here is a link to the site with all the kelp rock data thank you for reading my blog."

A big piece of kelp with small rocks on it

Tracking Change on the Elwha Shoreline (continued)

For the last seven days I've had the opportunity to participate in a variety of field campaigns focused on understanding shoreline change along the Elwha shoreline. We've just wrapped up a USGS-led survey that included everything from aerial imagery (from Andy Ritchie's PlaneCam), terrestrial LiDAR, topographic and bathymetric surveying (the photo above is of the USGS survey boat Snavely, with the new Elwha River mouth in the foreground), and grain size surveys. Almost simultaneously there was an effort by the WA DOE to map the bluffs of both the Elwha and Dungeness shorelines - a repeat survey to look at change since the initial survey in June of 2012.

The best part of the USGS survey work is that it will give us the first comprehensive look at the sub-tidal component of this winters' changes that have been so dramatic and obvious above water. I anticipate more on this to come in the weeks ahead as thousands of individual data points are processed and analyzed.

In the meantime,though, the BIG shoreline changes adjacent to the river mouth just keep getting bigger and better...but the interesting conclusion that I reached after three days of intensive work surveying grain size around the Elwha delta is that the influence of the pulse of sand that hit the shore in December really seems to be focused right around the river mouth - at least as far as its current influence on grain size on the intertidal foreshore. In this photo for example, taken from a point on the tip of the delta looking west, you can see how coarse the beach foreshore is even while, in the far field of the photo you can make out the now sandy river mouth (just beyond the last little person you can see in the photo).

One of the more interesting questions for me continues to be if and how the sediment delivered at the river mouth will nourish "downdrift" beaches - such that we will observe a reversal of chronic erosion and/or a reduction in the grain size on the beach foreshore. Some of the preliminary data from the bathymetric survey suggests that sediment is transporting to the east, but in the shallow water just off-shore. But as of yet, for most of the beach east of the river mouth, the name-of-the-game continues to be some degree of erosion and a beach composed, to an extent, of cobble. Near the river mouth, though, the changes are dramatic. For example, here is a shot taken on May 17, 2011 looking landward from a spot in the low intertidal zone taken on the beach just to the east of the river:

and here is a shot taken two days ago from the same vantage point:

Finally, one of the more dramatic consequences of the pulse of material that was delivered to the shoreline this winter was the formation and evolution of a large sandy bar attached to the west side of the river mouth. This time lapse video, shot from a point to the west of the river mouth (thank you Gene and Shannon Richardson), gives some sense of how that feature has evolved since December...

Note that it appears that you can get a slightly higher resolution version by viewing it directly at youtube.