| ||On the English Channel coast of Brittany, this house was built in 1953 on a narrow spit of granite sediment that extends the dunes of Keremma and closes the Kernic cove almost entirely, leaving the boats only a narrow passageway into the bay. Looking out on great expanses of sand at low tide, this thin arrow of a dune is almost totally surrounded by water when the sea rises again. Rough ocean winds and the daily rise and fall of the tides (about 26 feet, or 8 m) gradually eroded the fragile support for this isolated home. The house, which in 1983 stood nearly 150 feet (45 m) inland, by 1999 was just 6 feet (2 m) from the cliff edge overhanging the sea. It disappeared from the landscape in March 2000, when the inevitable erosion of the dune forced the owner to have it demolished before it could collapse. Installations by the shore conservation agency are trying to protect the Keremma dunes against the erosive action of the surf. Tides are shifts in the height of the coastal waters resulting from the gravitational attraction of the Moon and the Sun on the rotating Earth and occuring twice a day. They are typical of all the Earth’s seas low and high tides ranging from just a few inches in the Mediterranean Sea, to more than 52 feet (16 m) in the Atlantic (in the Bay of Fundy, Canada).
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