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The book communicates coastal geology such that the reader gets a better understanding of how scientists work and how scientific knowledge is acquired and how it progresses. It presents the human side of geologic research, including missteps, in this case, research on coastal change of the recent past, the present, and the near future. The audience for this volume is the general public, coastal managers, politicians, and decision makers in general, in the coastal realm. But the implications of this work with regard to future climate change and human responses are relevant globally.
List of contents
Chapter 1. A Cautionary Scientific Tale and an Introduction to this Book.- Chapter 2. Buried Secrets of the North CarolinaCoast, USA.- Chapter 3. Time and Tide Wait for No Man.- Chapter 4. Barrier Island Breakdown: the Ephemeral Outer Banks of North Carolina.- Chapter 5. A Different Kind of Sea-Level Story from Malaysia.- Chapter 6. What Lies Beneath? Revealing Coastal Processes through Mapping.- Chapter 7. The Anthropocene, Wait, What? A Basque's Coastal Experience Helps to Figure it Out.- Chapter 8. A Tale of Two Hydrogeology Problems in Coastal North Carolina.- Chapter 9. Drilling the North Carolina Coastal Plain - Discovering What Lies Beneath.- Chapter 10. Earthquake-Driven Coastal Change: Ghost Forests, Graveyards and "Komodo Dragons".- Chapter 11. A Scientist's Personal 70-Year Discourse with Past, Present and Future Coastal Change.- Chapter 12. Climate, Sea Level, and People - Changing South Florida's Mangrove Coast.- Chapter 13. Pictures from Space and Feet in the Mud: Understanding the Value of the World's Changing Mangrove Forests.- Chapter 14. What is Happening to the World's Coral Reefs?.- Chapter 15. The Water, the Coast, the Future.- Chapter 16. Afterword: The Power of the Ocean.
About the author
Educated at the University of Wales (Swansea), Steve Culver taught for two years at the University of Sierra Leone before moving to the US in 1978 on a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution. Except for a five-year sojourn at the Natural History Museum, London in the 1990s, Professor Culver has taught and conducted coastal research for over 30 years at Old Dominion University and East Carolina University. He is coeditor of a textbook on biotic response to global change over the past 135 million years and coauthor of a popular text on coastal change in North Carolina, USA. His recent research has utilized microfossils (foraminifera) as tools to reconstruct past and understand current coastal environmental change in North Carolina and peninsular Malaysia.
