Rancho Palos Verdes landslide is creating new coastline. ‘It’s unreal’

A resident walks next to an area where the waters have given way to a rocky coast that was transformed as the force of landslides pushed a combination of mostly basalt and bentonite up from below the sand. “That beach is brand new,” said Denny Jaconi, pointing to the rocky shoreline that he said didn’t exist just a few months ago. based on major emergence of land in the surf zone and nearshore zone at the southeasterly toe of the.” The new shoreline is about 250 feet farther out to sea after parts of the seafloor moved an estimated 10 feet vertically, he said, a “manifestation of this bigger, deeper, longer movement of the Portuguese Bend landslide.” Although this outcome is new for the area, geologist El Hachemi Bouali called the movement “actually quite normal for a landslide.” “In general, a landslide complex will lose material at the top and it will gain material at the bottom,” said Bouali, an assistant professor of geosciences for Nevada State University who has long studied the Portuguese Bend landslide complex. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got a private beach down there and a couple of new surf spots.’” He doesn’t know whether officials will ever find a way to slow the devastating land movement. “There’s new kelp beds out there, there was a huge pelican population that just left.. Now we’ve got like 50 feet of coastline — between ocean and landslide.”