Falling Off

Trey Smith

For over a decade, Della and I called Salem, Oregon home. We owned a little house on the west side of the Willamette River in a quiet neighborhood with tree-lined streets. We had a nice life there, but the Pacific Ocean was calling us. We wanted to live in a coastal community and, while Salem wasn't very far from the ocean -- only one hour away -- we wanted to be closer.

After a brief sojourn in Aberdeen, Washington, we moved to South Bend about 5 years ago. By air, South Bend is much closer to the ocean than Salem, but it's about the same distance by car. While we still entertain the fantasy of having an oceanfront home, I'm glad we don't have the financial wherewithal to make that dream a reality!

It's not that I still wouldn't like to see the ocean from my living room window. That thought makes me swoon romantic. It's more that I wouldn't want to wake up some morning to find the ocean...IN my living room!

In the coming years, many who live in oceanfront homes face this possibility. Why? Because of something that's going on in Greenland and other places in the Arctic and Antarctica.

A massive iceberg twice the size of Manhattan has broken off one of Greenland's major glaciers -- a development which scientists say is due to alarming warming in the region.

The iceberg, measuring 46 square miles, is the second of its nature to break from Greenland in just two years. In 2010 an iceberg twice its size, one of the largest ever recorded in Greenland, broke free.

"It's dramatic. It's disturbing," said University of Delaware professor Andreas Muenchow, one of the first researchers to notice the break. "We have data for 150 years and we see changes that we have not seen before. It's one of the manifestations that Greenland is changing very fast."

"This is not part of natural variations anymore," said NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, referring to the vast changes the glacier has seen in the past three years.

Scientists are concerned about rising sea levels due to melting ice in the north. The Arctic had the largest sea ice loss on record for June, scientists reported this week, and Northern Greenland and Canada are warming five times faster than the average global temperature.

"Rising sea levels" seems like a clinical term, one divorced from everyday living. So what if the ocean is a little bit deeper? But rising sea levels mean that communities and homes that abut the ocean are in peril. More water means more beach erosion and, if your house is ON the beach or in dunes NEAR the beach, you may have a big problem on your hands.

There is a community near here that straddles the line between Pacific and Grays Harbor Counties. Over the past decade, several homes in the North Cove area have been claimed by the sea. When these homes were built years ago, there was a buffer between the houses and the beach, but, as time passed, those buffers were wiped out by the tides. Every year or so, there is an article in the paper about another house that falls into the Pacific Ocean.

So, it turns out that South Bend is the perfect place for us. We're close to the ocean (there's an ocean viewpoint high on a bluff at Bruceport County Park about 6 miles west), but we're not right on it. We get to enjoy the perks of living in a small [near] coastal community without sharing the immediate worries of the encroaching ocean via global warming.

This is not to suggest that towns like South Bend would not be impacted in any form by rising sea levels. Our town is nestled along the south bend of the Willapa River just before it empties into Willapa Bay. As sea levels continue to rise, it will alter the bay and I am sure this will impact the river, but I don't think we have any homes in this area that will be falling into one body of water or another.

Of course, if we're hit by a tsunami, all bets are off!