The Sea Level Rise Committee welcomed coastal geologist Bryan Oakley to its meeting on Tuesday, August 1, not for a formal presentation, but just more for a “conversation” and a bit of guidance on where the committee was going.Although he is a professor at Eastern Connecticut University, Oakley, who attended the University of Rhode Island, has spent (at least) the last decade studying the Rhode Island coast, and Block Island in particular. Why? The Rhode Island coast is more accessible than Connecticut’s, and more “interesting,” too, he says.Oakley has three ongoing projects on Block Island, including beach profiling, historic shoreline mapping, and bluff erosion mapping. Unlike other areas of the state, Block Island had no previous “data sets” to measure change. The only available references to form some sort of a benchmark are some maps from 1952.Beach profiling started in June, 2013 after Hurricane Sandy hit the island the previous fall. As a community science project, local volunteers Nigel Grindley, Cathy Joyce, Judy Gray and Jules Craynock have been doing beach profiling utilizing the Modified Emery Method, also known as “two sticks and a string,” and
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