Why we need muck to fight rising sea levels
It’s a golden summer day, and I’m standing on a low coastal levee, overlooking a pond at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve that looks positively apocalyptic. … This pond is a legacy of a salt industry that has moved elsewhere. A few decades ago, when flying into San Francisco or San Jose, the ground beneath looked like a giant’s Easter egg dip. Ponds of blue, yellow, green, red, purple, orange, and pink ringed the South Bay. People had built low levees in semicircles from the shore, sectioning off portions of the bay to let the water evaporate, leaving behind the salt…. Humans are often inclined to build seawalls to protect coastal communities from encroaching oceans, but those require constant, expensive maintenance.
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