Sea level will rise a foot higher on New Jersey coast by 2050

Sea level likely will be a foot higher along New Jersey by 2050, and at the end of the century “Atlantic City’s going to see three feet,” said geology professor Ken Miller of Rutgers University. ...

“It’s not that they’re disappearing — they’re moving,” said Norbert Psuty, professor emeritus at Rutgers, displaying aerial photographs that show the wild beaches shifting hundreds of feet westward.

“Island Beach is in the process of breaking down and being transported inland,” Psuty said at a Wednesday conference on climate change and coastal hazards. At the southern tip of Long Beach Island, the refuge beach now lines up with the middle of Holgate’s street grid.

“What we’re seeing today is unprecedented” — a regional sea level rise rate of 4 millimeters per year after millennia during which sea level was stable or rising by perhaps 1 millimeter a year, Miller said. He studies the shifting coastline with core samples that drill down through tens of thousands of years of sediment. ...