Instant Genius - What our coastlines can tell us about the planet’s past and future

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

From the dramatic caves that bring to mind the pirates and smugglers of yore to the rolling sand dunes many of us likely played in as children, our coastlines are home to all manner of fascinating features, forged over centuries by crashing waves and harsh, unforgiving weather. But far from simply being picturesque, these landmarks can teach us about our planet’s past and ultimately, its future. In this episode, we speak to writer and author Matthew Yeomans about his latest book Seascape: Notes from a Changing Coastline. He speaks to us about the observations he made of the many and varied effects of climate change while walking along the Welsh coastline, how the threat of coastal flooding is very real and how nature-based solutions may well be the most effective way of protecting our precious coastlines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine how handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital

precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to incident genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, the BBC Science Focus. From the dramatic caves that bring to mind the pirates and smugglers of yore to the rolling sand dunes many of us likely played in as children. Our coastlines are home to all manner of fascinating features, forged over centuries by crashing waves and harsh, unforgiving weather. But far from being simply picturesque, these landmarks can teach us about our

planet's past and ultimately its future. In this episode, we speak to writer and author Matthew Yeoman's about his latest book, Seescape, Notes from a Changing Coastline. He speaks to us about the observations he made of the many and varied effects of climate change while walking along the Welsh coastline, how the threat of coastal flooding is very real, and how nature-based solutions may well be the most effective way at protecting our precious coastlines. So, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Oh, thanks very much for having me, Jason.

Looking forward to talking to you a little bit about my jewell. journey and musings around the coastline of Wales. So, as we say, we're talking about your book, Seescape, notes from a changing coastline. So what's a brief overview of the book then, by way of starting? Well, I guess I had written a previous book that had just come out, and that was about walking through the woodlands of Wales. And I was sort of looking for a new project. I'll be honest, I'm a writer, and, you know, I like to kind of have these things. And I knew I'd grown up by the sea.

I'm from Cardiff originally, though I'd lived abroad for many, many years. And, you know, I'd spent all my holidays by the sea and the coast of the Gower and West Wales. And so I've always been very kind of attracted, driven to doing it. And I thought, well, what would be a great new book if I was to wander the coastline of Wales and, you know, just kind of assess kind of how it's sort of shaped us as humanity and also, you know, how we've probably tried to shape it as well, the sea and the coastline. And as with my previous book, it was clear that it was full, rich of history and culture. But more than anything, the more I looked at it, it was about climate. And it was about

what is happening now or what will be happening in the coming decades around how the sea will shape all of our lives as climate change becomes a very, very visceral and tangible part of our future. But here's the thing, Jason. The more I looked into it, and the more I started walking, the more I realized that, you know, all of this is projections, it's predictions, it's we have a sense, but we really do not know what the future will look like. But what we can do and what was really interesting is we can observe from the past how the sea shaped the Welsh coastline and the people living in along it. And that, for me, was an opportunity that if we don't really know for sure what the future is, we can learn from the past. That's exactly what I was just going to ask.

So due to processes such as coastal erosion, etc., these areas are really prime spots for peering back in, well, let's start with geological history. And you mentioned a person named William Buckland in the book, you know. Yes, the reverent William Buckland. Exactly, yes. So what could we learn from his work? Well, he's a very interesting character. He is known as the father of British geology. I think he was the founding professor of geology in Oxford in the early 19th century. And he was an incredibly prolific geologist, explorer, one of these crazy kind of cadre of Victorians and pre-Victorians.

And actually, I come across these all through the book. These men, and they're always men, who pretty much felt they could shape the new world through this age of kind of Victorian daring, do and sense of who they were. But he was a very staunch Christian, and he was very much of the school of thought that everything could be traced back to the Great Flood, that the world didn't begin until after the Great Flood. Now, I tell you this because it has quite an important leaning on his greatest ever discovery, arguably. And that was in the late 1820s when he was called to the Welsh coast, to the Gower. And he was called by two prominent Welsh industrialists and kind of landed gentry who had been tipped off.

to this incredible discovery in a cave on the coast, the Gower Coast. And it was not far from Oxwich, which is a lovely part of the world, if you've ever been to the Gower Peninsula. And what they had found, they'd found these discoveries in the cave. They'd found animal bones, jaws. They'd found jewelry and kind of ornate kind of stone. but they'd also found a body. And it was quite well preserved this body, Jason.

But they didn't know what to make of it because it was covered in red. Anyway, so they called William Buckland and he hopped on his horse and his coach and he legged it, so to speak, to the coast of Wales and to the gower. And he went off with them to explore this cave. And they brought back all these remains.

and then he spent a lot of time studying them, and he deduced that it was a young lady, and she became famously known as the Red Lady of Pavaland, and the cave became known as the Pavilland Cave. Now, he couldn't work out how it could be that a young lady had been found in this cave. because his worldview was that nothing existed since before the Great Flood. Obviously, the dating of this body had to be after that. And so he started coming up with all these theories that kind of maybe, I think it's, if I remember that she had been sacrificed, that maybe she'd been a prostitute, that maybe she had been killed in some smuggling thing,

because his view was very much framed on that. lasted for a very, very long time. And keep in mind, this is happening at a really, really interesting time in the world of science in 19th century Britain and the world, where suddenly the worldview that everything was shaped by a biblical view of things was actually starting to be challenged and that actual science and process and data was coming in that was challenging all of this. This is before Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, an evolution, of course, but it's only 20 years before that. What we now know is that the lady was not a lady at all. It was a young man. And what we also now know through scientific testing and everything was that this young man wasn't from the 18th century or 2,000 years ago or whatever. It was actually 30,000 years old. and that the cave, which is on the coast, and the waves lap into this cave nowadays, once was probably 50 miles further inland on a high plane,

and that the body was of a young man who probably would have been, well, yes, in the early Neolithic period. But because of Buckland couldn't even fathom that worldview, he wasn't allowed in his mind to think beyond or to think outside of that worldview. So that's something that I was going to talk about too. So you mentioned there that was much further inland. So this is the idea of coastal erosion. As you mentioned in your book, you point out a lot of sort of landmarks, lots of sites that you see when you're walking along the coast. And you mentioned there caves, but you have pools, sea stacks, all of these sorts of things.

So these are all a product of coastal erosion. The actual cave itself is, well, yes, is being eroded now, but essentially it was on high ground before the end of the ice age. And what we saw basically was that the whole of the Welsh coast, the whole of the British coast, extended much further out to sea before the glaciers actually melted. So in Neolithic time, and we see this in the Gwent's levels and the estuary across, you're sitting there now in Bristol, I'm sitting here in Cardiff, back in the good old days,

Jason, I could have walked over to see you because the landmass of what we now know as the seven estuary or the river, the seven estuary didn't exist. And there was a landmass there that you could walk essentially from West Wales all the way over to Cornwall. This is in the era of Doggerland, of course, across on the wash, on the East Coast. This is when there was a land bridge, a land connection from Europe to what we now know as the British Isles, the United Kingdom. So also in the book, you talk about sand dunes. So I think this is really fascinating because we think, oh, they're pretty, aren't we? And probably most of us have played in them when we're kids or whatever. But there's a lot going on

there, you know, what can we say about that? So I think this is a really interesting, another start of the program I mentioned how we cannot see the future, but we can learn from the way that climate has shaped the past. And we are living in an age now of man-made climate change. We know that. That is happening, but it doesn't mean that there hasn't been climate change in the past. And in the 13th and 14th centuries, there was an enormous shire. shift in the topography and the makeup of the coast of Wales. Because for a 200-year period, the coast of Wales and other parts of the United Kingdom as well, but specifically on the western coast, was dramatically altered by a series of incredible storms. And these storms brought

with it what we now know is the literal sand dune scapes that we see. sea all up the Welsh coast. These didn't exist prior to the 13th, 14th century. They were essentially dumped onto the coastline during that time. Now, what's really fascinating about that is that they swallowed whole communities. There was a ancient Norman community in a place called Kenvig, which is near Porthkow on the Welsh coast. In the late 13th century, or early 14th century, excuse me if my historical dates are not spot on there, this was a really vibrant town. But over the course of 50, 60 years, it became swallowed, not by the sea, but by sand dunes as they formed as the storms came in. Now in my book I go walking in Kenvig. Kenvig Burrows it's called now.

Of course Burrows is obviously a name for sand dunes or a specific part of sand dunes. And I go with a group of friends and we get quite lost in these dunes because they are going they can be really disorienting. But we find and walk to the ruins of the old castle of the top wall of the castle and below us would have been the village, the town of Kenvig as it once survived in the 14th century. So the dunes are fascinating

for the physical effect that they had on the coast of Wales. Further up the coast, Harlech. It's one of the most famous castles. It's one of the most picturesque tourism-friendly places. you'll see. This is an amazing castle

that sits in land and protected by all these sand dunes. But there's a very interesting part to this castle, Jason, which is there's a set of steps that was built by the Normans, and this is a set of steps that come all the way down.

And they were kind of known as the sea steps. Because when the castle was built, the Welsh coast abutted the castle walls. but over a 200-year period, the land grew because of the sand dunes, so that now the actual sea is about a mile or maybe half a mile away from the castle. So there's all that elements of that, and there's lots of kind of interesting elements of biodiversity as well around these dunes. So sort of sticking with history for a while then.

So when you walk along the coast, as you do in your... your book and you detail. You can see evidence of past life going back thousands of years. So, you know, what are some highlights? So the coast path, you can walk, this is the Wales National Coast Path, right? It's an incredible kind of feat of, no pun intended, of getting people out walking around Wales. And you can start in Chepstow, which is where I started this walk, and you can take it all the way around. Actually, you can go to, all the way down to Chester on the other side, going all the way around the coast of Wales

and of Eunice Morn, Anglesea, and you can walk every step of it. I didn't do every step of it, but I did, it's 870 miles long. I did about 400, 450 miles. When you start in Chepstow, and you walk down the seven estuary, You come into this area of the Gwent levels that is an absolute treasure trove for archaeologists because over the last 50 years, a number of excavations, but also just local people walking in the mudflats,

have found footprints of Neolithic settlements, of young children's footprints. So there's an ancient history underneath our feet as you walk down the Gwent levels. This is also the part that's fascinating because this is all reclaimed land. And it's the same side on the English side as well. It was reclaimed. On the Welsh side, it was reclaimed by the Romans initially because they had a massive military base at Kaelian. And they needed a place to graze their horses and to have. agricultural land. So they built this complex section of reams and gouts. They were channels that

cut through the levels and drain them down to the estuary and the sea. And of course the estuary, because it's an estuary, the tide goes in and tide goes out. It's the seven, so it goes out at an enormous rate and comes in at enormous rate. And what that allowed the Romans to do was to build sluice gates so that the water would drain out when the tide was low and the sluice gate would block when the tide came in. Now that was then left to languish when the Romans went back, when they left kind of the United Kingdom and Europe in that way. But when the Normans arrived, they also said, ah, this looks a pretty good idea. And the monks who lived on the Gwent levels created an even more intricate kind of structure.

Today, if you walk down the Wales Coast path, you will see still the working reams and gouts that were started by the Romans. So that's just one example there, but then there are lots of other, we could go back even further. There's parts of Pembrokeshire that have incredible neelioristicshire,

incredible Neolithic Iron Age promontory forts. And this is an area of history but also science nowadays that we are only beginning to learn a lot more about. You can also see an amazing promontory fort up above a place called Comtidi, which is on the walk to Mewke in Pembrokeshire. Now, we now think that these forts, well, I say we think, people much smarter than me, think. There's a very famous archaeologist called Dr. Toby Driver, who basically has done all this work on the ancient hill forts of Iron Age Wales. A lot of his research shows that these were really important trading posts for the ancient sea routes, these promontory forts, which is why they're on the coast. And they possibly connected as far south with communities in Portugal, maybe Africa, a scope

of life on the coast of Wales that we would have had no idea about beforehand. Thinking about training for a new career in healthcare, American Career College offers multiple healthcare training programs that can be completed in a year or less, including medical assistant, dental assisting, pharmacy technician and optical technician. And if you're interested in nursing, the vocational nursing program can help prepare you

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So a lot of people know about the threat of flooding. So of course, New Orleans famously was horrifically flooded a while back. 2005, I believe, right? Yeah. You think of, I don't know, Maldives, Bangkok. But Cardiff is also. under threat, you know, it's on our doorstep, something I would never have thought. Latest Welsh government projections say that over 10%, 11.3% of land in Wales

will be at risk from flooding, from rivers and the sea in the coming decades. Like not in 100 years' time, in 20, 30 years time. Okay, so 11.3% doesn't sound that much right. well, more than 60% of the population of Wales live and work in the coastal zone. And as you mentioned, my hometown of Cardiff, I spent a lot of time walking through it, looking at the history of Cardiff, how it was built, developed, of course, it was developed because of the coal industry, all of South Cardiff, all of the communities that were built to house people in the late 19th century.

around the coal trade. Well, they're all built on what in Welsh is called Morava, Salt Marsh. So essentially, you have a city, and it's not just Cardiff. Many other towns around the Welsh coast are built on reclaimed land. Flandidno, all reclaimed land. Potheli, all reclaimed land. So this is a story. I mean, Cardiff is lucky. It has an enormous barrage that up until now has protected it in that way. In decades past, even as early as the 1970s, the River Taff on a tidal used to flood quite regularly and would flood some of these communities. So, you know, in my lifetime, I can remember flooding around there. It hasn't happened up until recently. And again, this comes back to the bit I was saying before. And I'm trying to, quite careful in the book, Jason, not to kind

to go out on a limb and say this will definitively happen in this way because we don't know, but what we do know, as we've seen with massive flooding in Spain recently, in Germany, what we've seen with the fires in California is that our weather systems are being supercharged and that projected impacts of things that we once thought were happening, are now happening at 10, 50 times what was expected. So in no way do I want to kind of be the writer here says, oh, doom, we're all, you know. However, what does happen to a city like Cardiff?

If there is an enormous spring tide that coincides with a winter storm and, you know, and kind of river flooding, we haven't seen that type of pressure, and I'm not saying what would happen in that way, but we do know all along the coast of Wales that it is a major, major concern for the authorities. So this isn't just for human beings. This has a massive impact on the entire ecosystem and on wildlife, you know. So what can we say about that?

Well, we can say that breeding grounds for, you know, again, back onto the Gwent levels, there are very important breeding grounds for many types of birds, for migratory species. There's a risk to them. Flooding will have a catastrophic effect on that. I mean, there are concerns not from flooding, but potentially from erosion for other bird colonies on some of the islands, like Skokholm, some of the other ones around the Welsh coast. On estuary systems, we are seeing major issues with kind of the salt marsh itself, but also we've seen a huge amount of seagrass depletion,

which again is a very important kind of area of biodiversity for different species as well. But there's an interesting point to this, because we are also seeing that those elements of biodiversity, salt marsh, sea grasses, if we can preserve them and there are actual efforts going on, not just to preserve them, but to propagate them, to actually spread them back through different estuarine communities in Wales, If we can do that, they provide incredible natural defenses against sea level rise and erosion. What happened essentially was back to our crazy Victorian engineers here, right? The men who could, I call them the men who thought they could tame the sea.

We basically constructed our way out of these natural defenses by, creating our urban environments and our beautiful Victorian promenards. And to do all that, these men ripped apart the actual natural systems that would have protected large parts of the coast in the past. So, sort of, we've talked about an awful lot there. Do you think, really, the path forwards is by not saying correcting these mistakes, but, you know, recognising the kind of force of nature, not trying to resist it? Yes. That's a very short answer. I'll give you a slightly longer answer, but that's your succinct answer. I think what we've learned, right? And this isn't just on the

coast, we see it in the mountains, we see it in the woodlands, we see it in our cities. We can try and tame nature, but we always fail. The power of nature is immense. How nature itself works is that adapts within different environments. Now, we know that there has been a trend, and hopefully not just a trend, but a revolution in architecture and engineering over the past 30, 40 years around biomimicry, around building and constructing with the lessons

and the learnings of how nature works in mind. The gherking is a great example of a building of a skyscraper that actually, I think if I'm right, it mimics a giant sea anemone in its kind of ecostructure. It's quite something in that way, and we are seeing a number of different elements of that. But it doesn't have to be around, you know, new skyscrapers and the like. We can think about how we shape our coastlines, how we protect from erosion by, drawing on the lessons from the sea, and it's happening already. So there's a process known as sandcaping that is happening at the moment on the North Wales coast, but it's a Dutch

invention in the past because, obviously, you know, it's to protect a lot of the coast in the Netherlands. And it can be really effective as a sea defence, because what it does is essentially it's dumping sand, but it's putting sand on beach, in a way that helps dissipate and absorb the force of the sea. And it's often from taking sand from deep out in the ocean, bringing it in an almost kind of layering effect. Now, it can be incredibly effective, but it only works in certain environments.

And as it was with everything we know in nature, everything is interconnected. So it can be counterproductive if it is added to protected. habitats, or if it's put next to a beach which then just suffers from the effect of the sea being pushed down that way. So one of the things I think we have to think about, and again, I am not an expert on this, but I think one of the things we have to think about when we come up with these solutions, whether they're constructive solutions, nature-based solutions, is what does the knock-on effect? How does the whole ecosystem kind of benefit or suffer? And do we take in

a whole ecosystem viewpoint while we're doing it. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was writer and author Matthew Yeoman's. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book, Seescape, Notes from a Changing Coastline. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius

on your preferred podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in video content, then please check out our YouTube channel. at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com.

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