Guest Presenter: Gary Griggs
Read more about Gary’s work and books
at gary-griggs.com.
The shoreline is one of the most important lines on the planet and the majority of the world’s largest cities were built on coastlines. But the shoreline is moving inland, and we are in the way. As sea level rises in response to a warming plant, ice melts and seawater expands. We are already feeling the impacts of a rising sea along the California coast, including coastal flooding, shoreline retreat and coastal erosion, but this is a global issue. With climate change and sea-level rise, we have three choices for the future: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation and suffering we will experience.
Gary Griggs is a Distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research, teaching, writing and lectures have focused on the coast of California and include coastal processes, hazards, and the impacts of and responses to sea-level rise. In 1998 he received the Outstanding Physical and Biological Sciences Faculty Award at U.C. Santa Cruz, and the Alumni Association honored him with a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006. The California Coastal Commission and Sunset Magazine named him one of California’s Coastal Heroes in 2009, and in 2010 he was elected to the California Academy of Sciences. Gary chaired a committee in 2017 recommended by Governor Brown to update California’s sea-level rise projections.
Gary has written 14 books including: Living with the Changing California Coast; Introduction to California’s Beaches and Coast; The California Coast from the Air; Coasts in Crisis – A Global Challenge; The Edge – The Pressured Past and Precarious Future of California’s Coast; Between Paradise and Peril – The Natural Disaster History of the Monterey Bay Region; The Ominous Ocean: Rogue Waves, Rip Currents and other Dangers along the Shoreline and at Sea; and most recently California Catastrophes – The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State.
