In : International Coastal Symposium (ICS) : 2013 Proceedings (Plymouth, England )International audienceThe climate component of sea level variation displays significant spatial variability, and it is now possible to reconstruct how sea level varied globally and regionally over the past half century. The fact that sea level rose faster than the global mean since 1950 in the central Pacific stimulated a study of decadal shoreline changes in this region. Here, the study of Yates et al. (2013) was extended to two additional atolls (17 islets): Tetiaroa and Tupai in the Society islands. Both atolls remain stable on the whole from 1955 to 2001/02, however with significant differences in shoreline changes among their islets and within the period. A modeling of waves generated by historical cyclonic events in French Polynesia since 1970 reveals consistency between major shoreline changes and cyclonic and seasonal waves. As in previous studies, this suggests that waves' actions are a dominant cause of shoreline dynamics on relatively undeveloped atolls, even if affected by higher sea level rise rates. In such regions, numerous joint analyses of shoreline changes and their potential causes may help to explain the relation between erosion and sea level rise
International audienceRecent works have highlighted the interest in coastal geographical databases - collected for coastal management purposes - for obtaining insight into current shoreline changes. On La Réunion, a tropical volcanic high island located in the Southern Indian Ocean, a dataset is available which describes shoreline changes, the coastal geomorphology and the presence of anthropic structures. This database is first supplemented with information on the exposure of each coastal segment to energetic waves and to estuarine sediment inputs. To incorporate relative sea-level changes along the coast in the database, levelling data are analysed in combination with GPS, satellite altimetry and sea-level reconstructions. Finally, a method based on Bayesian networks is used to assess the probabilistic relationships between the variables in the database. The results highlight the high degree of dependency between variables: a retrospective model is able to reproduce 81% of the observations of shoreline mobility. Importantly, we report coastal ground motions for La Réunion island of the order of 1 to 2 mm/year along the coast. However, the resulting differing rates of relative sea-level rise do not significantly impact on shoreline changes. Instead, the results suggest a major control of geological processes and local coastal geomorphic settings on shoreline evolution. While any exploration of a coastal database needs to be complemented with human reasoning to interpret the results in terms of physical processes, this study highlights the significance of revisiting other datasets to gain insight into coastal processes and factors causing shoreline changes, including sea-level changes
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