Posted on May 27, 2026
According to the Gold Coast Waterways Authority, the Gold Coast Sand Bypass System is the world’s first permanent sand bypass system. The infrastructure was designed to solve a problem that most coastal cities still try to tackle with expensive and inefficient periodic dredging. The system was built in 1986 as an integral part of the Gold Coast Seaway, the artificial entrance created to stabilize the mouth of the Nerang River into the Pacific Ocean, in Queensland, southeastern Australia. Before 1986, the bar of the Nerang River was described as “incredibly dangerous.”
The river mouth migrated up to 60 meters north per year, driven by southeast winds, littoral drift, and currents that move 500,000 cubic meters of sand along the southeastern coast of Queensland every year.
Gold Coast Seaway stabilized the Nerang River, but could destroy beaches to the north
The conventional solution to stabilize a coastal entrance like this is two parallel breakwaters, capable of holding the river mouth in a fixed position. But breakwaters create a new and immediate problem: they interrupt the natural flow of sand along the coast.
