The sand is gone. In Carlsbad, California — a city of 112,000 that funds a significant portion of its budget through beach tourism — Tamarack Beach disappeared almost overnight, KELO reports. What took decades to form was stripped away in hours. Across Southern California, the story repeats: seawalls breached, roads cracked, homes condemned.

The force behind it all is El Niño — the periodic warming of surface waters across the central and eastern tropical Pacific that reshapes weather across the entire planet. And this one is breaking records before winter has even begun.

The Threat That Grows Before Your Eyes

Remnants of Hurricane Marie delivered the opening blow to Southern California's coastline, erasing beaches and damaging seawalls from Malibu to Dana Point. More than a dozen oceanfront homes in Orange County were severely damaged, with at least one marked for demolition, The Spokesman-Review reports. Several cities declared local emergencies.

Climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain of the University of California told KTLA that El Niño-warmed waters have pushed local sea levels six to twelve inches above normal — meaning every wave now rides on a much higher platform. Water temperatures in the key El Niño regions, he added, have never been this warm this early in the season.

An invisible threat compounds the visible one. A slow pulse of warmer water known as a Kelvin wave — set in motion by El Niño's weakening of trade winds — is moving up the Pacific coast. It carries no visible breaker. There is nothing to watch. Yet tide gauges will register its arrival as a gradual, sustained rise in the waterline, Nature World News explains. When that elevated baseline collides with king tides or winter storms, the destruction accelerates sharply.

The Bill Is Already Staggering

Disaster risk modelers at Climate X, backed by Google Ventures, project that El Niño could cause two to three billion dollars in losses from flooding and mudslides across California through the winter — against a typical annual flood damage bill of around five hundred million dollars, NDTV reports.

History backs the alarm. A U.S. Geological Survey study found that the 2015–2016 El Niño — one of the strongest in 145 years — produced a mean of nearly 46 meters of beach erosion across central California, affecting 96 percent of beaches measured. Coastal cliffs retreated. Infrastructure cracked. It will happen again, and likely worse.

It's Not Just California

The East Coast faces its own reckoning. El Niño shifts the Pacific jet stream southward, steering more storms toward the Mid-Atlantic and increasing nor'easter frequency. During strong El Niño years, coastal locations from Boston to Charleston have experienced nearly three times the typical number of storm surges, according to research reviewed by NBC News.

NOAA warns of a "double whammy" effect: decades of sea level rise have already pushed water close to the edge in many communities, and El Niño's added ocean warming tips it over. CBS News reports that the Gulf and Southeast coasts face elevated rainfall, while the Atlantic coast braces for increased storm surge. No coastline is exempt.

What Comes Next

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography are conducting statewide lidar surveys of California's entire coastline to measure changes as this El Niño peaks, Scripps Institution of Oceanography explains. The data will shape how communities respond for years ahead.

The California Coastal Commission warns that this El Niño has a strong possibility of becoming a historically powerful "super" event, with its greatest effects expected during the winter storm season. The advice for coastal residents is blunt: inspect your property now, fix vulnerabilities before the storms arrive, and stay alert to official warnings. The Pacific is not finished.