composition of ground water in the transition zone to the composition of fresh 

 ground water and seawater. (Modified Abstract). 



214 MEO, M. 1989. "Climate Change Impacts on Coastal Environments: 

 Implications for Strategic Planning," Proceedings of Coastal Zone '89 . Vol 2, 

 pp 1384. 



As scientific reports continue to link trace gas emissions with changing 

 climate, concern has grown over the near- term implications of climate change 

 for public policy in general and strategic planning in particular. Coastal 

 environments are especially vulnerable to "greenhouse effect" impacts such as 

 accelerated sea-level rise, reduction of fresh water inflows, and the possible 

 increase in the frequency of extreme storm events. Two major concerns of 

 decision makers are to determine the timing and magnitude of different climate 

 change impacts and to design rational strategies for responding to them. 

 Climate change impacts on coastal environments with reference to three coastal 

 regions including: Apalachicola Bay and estuary in northwest Florida, the 

 Mississippi River Deltaic Plain in coastal Louisiana, and the Sacramento -San 

 Joaquin Delta in California. (Modified Abstract). 



215 MERRILL, A. S., EMERY, K. 0., and RUBIN, M. 1965. "Ancient Oyster 

 Shells on the Continental Shelf," Science . Vol 147, pp 398-400. 



Shells of long-dead Crassostrea virginica are reported at 71 stations in 

 depths of 14 to 82 ms . The depths exceed those of the estuaries where the 

 species flourishes. Radiocarbon measurements indicate that the oysters were 

 alive 8000 to 11,000 years ago. It is concluded that the oysters lived in la- 

 goons or estuaries which became submerged when the sea- level rose at the end 

 of the latest glacial epoch. (Authors). 



216 MIDDLETON, J. F., and THOMPSON, K. R. 1986. "Return Periods of Extreme 

 Sea-Levels From Short Records," Journal of Geophysical Research . Vol 91, 

 No. CIO, pp 11,707-711,716. 



Extreme sea- levels usually arise from a combination of the tides 

 (assumed here to be deterministic) and story surges (assumed stochastic) . We 

 show in this paper how tide and surge statistics derived from short (-1 year) 

 records can be used to predict the occurrence of extremes with much longer 

 return periods (-50 years) . The method is based on an extension of the ex- 

 ceedance theory originally developed by Rice (1954) to study noise in electri- 

 cal circuits. A comparison of predicted return periods with those obtained 

 directly from a 50-year Markovian simulation of surge is used to validate the 

 exceedance probability method. The method is next applied to the Canadian 

 ports of Halifax and Victoria, which are dominated by semidiurnal and diurnal 

 tides, respectively. To provide a stringent test of the method, just 1 year's 

 data from each port are used to estimate the tide, surge statistics, and hence 

 return periods . The predictions are found to compare well with the results of 



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