Chile's Mega-Quake Restored Beaches and Biodiversity

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http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/05/chiles-mega-tsunami-restored-beaches-and-biodiversity

Chile's 8.8 earthquake and tsunami of 2010 caused massive devastation, not least along its coastline, with some beaches subsiding and losing biodiversity, and some rocky reefs uplifting and losing biodiversity—as you might expect.

But thanks to the investigations of a science team already looking at the ecology of Chile's sandy beaches before the quake, we now know this natural disaster also engineered some powerful and unexpected forms of coastal restoration.

This occurred where the temblor uplifted coastlines with coastal armouring—like seawalls and rocky revetments—which allowed those once-disappearing beaches to quickly grow where they had not grown in a long time, and allowed plants and other species to reinhabit places they hadn't inhabited in a long time.

The study, just published in the open-access PLoS ONE, also previews the types of changes we might expect from climate warming and its accompanying sea level rise.