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    Rising seas are consuming coastal farmlands twice as fast as forests, despite farmers' efforts to build levees. A new study reveals that over 25,000 acres of Mid-Atlantic cropland have been lost to saltwater intrusion, as annual crops lack the resilience of trees.
    Science

    Rising seas are consuming coastal farmlands twice as fast as forests, despite farmers’ efforts to build levees. A new study reveals that over 25,000 acres of Mid-Atlantic cropland have been lost to saltwater intrusion, as annual crops lack the resilience of trees.


    Rising seas are consuming coastal farmlands twice as fast as forests, despite farmers’ efforts to build levees. A new study reveals that over 25,000 acres of Mid-Atlantic cropland have been lost to saltwater intrusion, as annual crops lack the resilience of trees.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-026-01835-6

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    1. DrTonyTiger on

      Mother Nature scoffs at your levees.  
      She figured out the physics and developed a brilliant forest solution to shoreline stabilization. The technique is called natural selection.

    2. TiredOfDebates on

      Saltwater intrusion into groundwater is something I’ve learned about recently.

      Mostly due to wells pulling water out of the ground, but also due to storm surges raising sea levels.

      Pulling water out of low-lying coastal ground creates a void, that if sufficiently large, causes saltwater to flow inwards (underground) increasing the salinity of the ground water. This is a slow process.

      The higher the sea level, over the long term (counting short-term events that cause dramatic increases during storm surges)… the higher the sea level the higher the pressure pushing in. More saltwater intrusion.

      Of course hurricanes that dump lots of salt water on the ground rapidly increase salinity.

    3. Wurm42 on

      This is a big problem on the Delmarva peninsula right now.

      The land doesn’t have to stay flooded long-term to be lost as cropland; just the occasional saltwater dunk can make soil too alkaline for most crops.

      Levees and seawalls are far too expensive to be widely used to protect agricultural land. The most successful, sustainable, efforts to date have been restoring dunes, wetlands, and native vegetation to create buffer zones between cropland and the water.