NEW SHOREHAM — With each storm, another layer of the Block Island landfill washed away.

Weather-beaten tires, chunks of concrete and twisted metal emerged from its disintegrating face. Broken bottles and rusty cans spilled down the bluff onto West Beach below.

One nor’easter in 2011 unearthed a ramshackle sedan, the top sheared off but its bottom intact, seemingly parked in the wet slope. In the wake of Superstorm Sandy the following year, the marine debris nonprofit Clean Bays removed more than 10 tons of junk from the shoreline.

Closed three decades ago after more than a century of use, the landfill was partially capped and sealed off with a chain-link fence. And although it was near the beach, it was set back far enough that no immediate threat was apparent.

But as storm after storm swept through, the shoreline eroded, creeping backward under the relentless forces of nature. The fence toppled first, consigned to the trash it once stood over, and then the dump itself started a slow, inexorable collapse.

Last year, the town started building a $2-million seawall across the landfill to shield it from the encroaching waters. The boulder-and-earth wall should help, but nobody expects it to offer permanent protection.

“The site will continue to erode,” says Grover Fugate, executive director of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council. “It’s just a question of how fast.”

Kim Gaffett, former first warden of the New Shoreham Town Council and a lifelong Block Islander, puts it in starker terms.

“The land is going to give way,” says Gaffett, a naturalist with The Nature Conservancy, and the ocean will take over.”

Not so long ago, the conservancy named Block Island one of a dozen “Last Great Places” in the Western Hemisphere, celebrating work that has protected nearly half of it from development.

But protecting Block Island from the power of the ocean may prove a more intractable challenge. The wind-whipped patch of land, which sits 12 miles off the Rhode Island coast, has some of the highest rates of erosion in a state prone to erosion.

Normal wave action has an effect, but coastal storms are the real drivers of change. Scientists expect them to become more frequent and more powerful as the planet continues to warm.

Sea-level rise is only adding to their impact, pushing storm surges higher, extending their reach inland, and amplifying their ability to tear away at the shore. With higher seas, even weaker storms could do heavy damage.

And so erosion is only expected to speed up with the passage of time — not just on Block Island but all along Rhode Island’s 420 miles of shoreline.