GASPÉSIE PENINSULA
Québec, Canada
The case of the Gaspésie Peninsula materializes through erosion—the continual wearing away and transport of material. As an earthly process, erosion is so universal that it evades the norms of environmental policy that depicts the exchange as a negative attribute within conservation and restoration models. When land is lost, blame is laid on erosion. That is why today, human societies that live along highly erosive shores are allied with retreat. Retreat is not caused by environmental limits, rather, crossing environmental limits necessitates retreat. The shores of the Gaspésie Peninsula are wild places, and erosion reminds us that domestication of the edge is a miscalculation that tends to distress landowners and homeowners because it upends the desire for possession and ownership. It is hard to own a mobile property, yet residents are keenly aware of the authority of erosion and the ignorance of governance, which engenders civic advocacy within communities unwilling to waste years calculating erosion rates and disinclined to wait for a political breakthrough on climate change. As high tides push landward, homeowners adjust to change on their own terms.
The Maule River estuary outfalls at Constitución, one of the hardest hit communities following the tsunami in 2010. Extreme pulses of inundation are common to estuarine environments where marine sand meets river silt. At present, many estuaries along the Chilean coast are infilled by coastal concretization that intervenes between marine and terrestrial realms.
The wave action following an earthquake brought silty inundation, erosion, and deposition to the estuarine coast, a disturbance that is neither unprecedented nor particularly unique. The lineage of estuary formation across time is described by paleo-geological
analysis which confirms that the southwest coast of
Chile is a remarkably active area on t
A rupture twenty-five kilometers deep beneath the Nazca plate, produced the earthquake, triggering a tsunami that traveled along the
fault at tectonic junctions. The magnitudinous waves spread beneath the coast until making landfall along the shores between Constitución and Concepción. Magnitude is relative power, and its measurement takes into account the energy released at the source. By comparison, intensity is the strength of the shaking produced by the magnitude.