Hurricane Idalia shows nature may provide the best shoreline protection – NPR

"Living Shoreline" large dome artificial reefs are ready to be positioned off the coast of Florida (by Amanda Nalley, courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/ via Flickr).

When Hurricane Idalia slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast in August (2023), one of the hardest hit areas was Cedar Key. A nearly 7-foot storm surge battered the small fishing community…(NOAA) says Idalia caused an estimated $3.6 billion in damage…But on Cedar Key, when the water receded, scientists found some good news amid all the damage. Nature-based “living shoreline” projects built to protect roads, buildings and other structures were relatively undamaged…

The World’s Fastest-Sinking Megacity Has One Last Chance to Save Itself – Bloomberg

Jakarka, Indonesia - Above and Below (by Chandrahadi Junarto CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Venice is sinking. So are Rotterdam, Bangkok and New York. But no place compares to Jakarta, the fastest-sinking megacity on the planet. Over the past 25 years, the hardest-hit areas of Indonesia’s capital have subsided more than 16 feet. The city has until 2030 to figure out a solution, experts say, or it will be too late to hold back the Java Sea…

Is this ‘age of the delta’ coming to an end? – Knowable Magazine

Zeeland, Netherlands as seen from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission (courtesy of by the European Space Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO via www.esa.int)

The land near the mouth of the Mississippi River is barely land at all. Muddy water forks into a labyrinth of pathways through a seemingly endless expanse of electric-green marsh grass, below skies thick with birds. Shrimp and crabs wriggle in the water below, and oak and cypress sprout from wet soils on higher grounds. Stretching for more than a hundred miles along the coast of Louisiana, this is one of the world’s largest, and most famous, river deltas…