What kind of beach are you?
As a good follow-up to yesterday’s post on middens, is something that I always do when visiting a beach, I look at my feet. Huh? Well, what I mean is, I look at what kind of beach I"m standing on. Sandy? Pebbly? Rocky? I’m not going to get into examining the sand itself (though it is cool if you find a beach made up of crushed shells), but what you’re standing can tell you a lot about how the beach forms, grows, shrinks, etc.
The beach in the midden example (at least above the high-tide line is made up of small stones. No sand. Stones. Why? Energy, lots of energy. This particular beach faces the direction that big storms come from. Over the centuries all the sand has been washed out leaving only stones behind. Since the stones are on the smallish size I can tell that the wave energy isn’t huge. Enough to wash away sand and pebbles, but not larger stones. Now if the beach was only made up of softball and larger stones, well you can imagine the energy required to wash everything else away. The more wave energy that hits the beach, the larger the stones (clasts to be technical) left behind.
So if you’re going to camp by a beach and a storm is coming, picking one with only medium to large stones probably isn’t a good idea.
Tags: beach erosion, high-energy beaches
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