The 1990s witnessed a significant increase in popular interest in the US regarding the geography of the world’s coastal and marine spaces. Factors motivating this renewed interest included growing public environmental awareness, a decade of unusually severe coastal storms, more frequent reporting of marine pollution hazards, greater knowledge about (and technology for) depleting fishstocks, domestic legislation on coastal zone management and offshore fisheries policies, new opportunities for marine mineral extraction, heightened understanding of the role of marine life in maintaining the global ecosystem, new techniques for undertaking marine exploration, the 1994 activation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, reauthorization of the US Coastal Zone Management Act in 1996, and designation of 1998 as the International Year of the Ocean. Responding to this situation, the breadth of perspectives from which coastal and marine issues are being encountered by geographers, the range of subjects investigated, and the number of geographers engaging in coastal-marine research have all increased during the 1990s. As West (1989a) reported in the original Geography in America, North American coastal-marine geography during the 1980s was focused toward fields such as coastal geomorphology, ports and shipping, coastal zone management, and tourism and recreation. Research in these areas has continued, but in the 1990s, with increased awareness of the importance of coastal and marine areas to physical and human systems, geographers from a range of subdisciplines beyond those usually associated with coastal-marine geography have begun turning to coastal and marine areas as fruitful sites for conducting their research. Climatologists are investigating the sea in order to understand processes such as El Niño, remote-sensing experts are studying how sonic imagery can be used for understanding species distribution in three-dimensional environments, political ecologists are investigating the ocean as a common property resource in which multiple users’ agendas portend conflict and cooperation, and cultural geographers are examining how the ocean is constructed as a distinct space with its own social meanings and “seascapes.” Despite (or perhaps because of ) this expansion in coastal-marine geography, the subdiscipline remains fragmented into what we here call “Coastal Physical Geography,” “Marine Physical Geography,” and “Coastal-Marine Human Geography.”
Coast to coast: current multidisciplinary research trends in German coastal and marine geography