Rising seas, shifting sands threaten ancient Alexandria

Deccan Herald

24-07-2025

From her ninth-floor balcony over Alexandria's seafront, Eman Mabrouk looked down at the strip of sand that used to be the wide beach where she played as a child.
"The picture is completely different now," she said. The sea has crept closer, the concrete barriers have got longer and the buildings around her have cracked and shifted.
Every year 40 of them collapse across Egypt's second city, up from one on average a decade ago, a study shows.
The storied settlement that survived everything from bombardment by the British in the 1880s to attacks by crusaders in the 1160s is succumbing to a subtler foe infiltrating its foundations.
The warming waters of the Mediterranean are rising, part of a global phenomenon driven by climate change. In Alexandria, that is leading to coastal erosion and sending saltwater seeping through the sandy substrate, undermining buildings from below, researchers say.
"This is why we see the buildings in Alexandria being eroded from the bottom up," said Essam Heggy, a water scientist at the University of Southern California who co-wrote the study published in February describing a growing crisis in Alexandria and along the whole coast.
The combination of continuous seawater rises, ground subsidence and coastal erosion means Alexandria's coastline has receded on average 3.5 metres a year over the last 20 years, he told Reuters.
'For many people who see that climatic change is something that will happen in the future and we don't need to worry about it, it's actually happening right now, right here," Heggy said.
The situation is alarming enough when set out in the report - "Soaring Building Collapses in Southern Mediterranean Coasts" in the journal Earth's Future. For Mabrouk, 50, it has been part of day-to-day life for years.
She had to leave her last apartment when the building started moving.