In late January, one of the beaches close to my childhood home had a massive erosion event from increased sea levels and storms. All throughout my life, my family always avoided Wildwood beach because it took so long to walk to a water from the boardwalk, about a quarter mile. However, less then 10 years later, the water is only a few hundred feet away from the boardwalk. Because the beach is so long, no sand dunes were put in place to help protect against the rising ocean, which has no become a pressing issue. While there was a plan to start creating more dunes in 2017, the project never started, and a retaining wall, or bulkhead, had started to be built instead, but even that was scrapped. Because of the most recent storms and rising sea levels, a new bulkhead project was proposed, but it would only start in 2025 or later, leaving the beach's residents and businesses at the mercy of mother nature. In an article written about the beach and potential upcoming project, the writers include a single image of Wildwood beach, combined from an image from 1995 and another from late 2023. The two images are from one area, and have been scaled and matched evenly side by side so that the 1995 image shows the left most part of the area and the 2023 image shows the right part of the area. This allows us to be able to see the true extent of the sea level rise from where the two images meet, rather than using two images from the same exact area with the same nadir. From these images, it's easy to see how much of a threat there is to multiple buildings at the end of 2023, which will only continue to get worse.
https://wildwoodvideoarchive.com/are-north-wildwoods-beaches-gone-forever/
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