The key features of Backshore include well-sorted and well-rounded sediments; coarse and medium sand; parallel bedding and low-angle cross-bedding in sedimentary structure.
What is backshore in geology?
Backshore. The backshore area of a beach extends from the limit of high water foam lines to dunes or extreme inland limit of the beach. It is only affected by waves during exceptional high tides or severe storms. Sediments in this area are well-sorted and well-rounded. Its grain sizes are mainly coarse sand and medium sand,...
What is the backshore zone of a beach?
backshore The part of a beach that is above the level of normal high spring tides. This zone is usually dry; only when exceptionally high tides or storms occur does wave action influence this part of a beach. Characteristic plants of this area include halophytes and plants with xeromorphic adaptations.
What is the difference between foreshore and backshore?
The part of the beach lying between the foreshore and coastline. The backshore is dry under normal conditions, is often characterised by berms and is without vegetation. The backshore is only exposed to waves under extreme events with high tide and storm surge.
What is the difference between intertidal and backshore and dunes zones?
In this context, this area is recognized as the backshore and dunes zone. Intertidal zone: is located between the normal low and high tide levels. This zone is therefore repeatedly inundated by water and exposed to air. This also represents the zone where waves are routinely interacting with the land, leading to daily transport of sediment.
What are the main features of a beach?
A beach is a narrow, gently sloping strip of land that lies along the edge of an ocean, lake, or river. Materials such as sand, pebbles, rocks, and seashell fragments cover beaches. Most beach materials are the products of weathering and erosion.
What is a backshore in geography?
Definition of Backshore: The part of the beach lying between the beach face and the dune foot or the coastline.
What are the 4 coastal features?
Cliffs, caves, arches, and stacks are features along rocky coastlines. These are formed as powerful waves wear away the rocks at sea level.
What is the backshore zone?
Backshore. The part of the beach lying between the beach face and the front dune, cliff base, vegetation line or coastal protection structure. The backshore is dry under normal conditions; it is often characterised by berms. Vegetation is generally sparse or even absent.
What is backshore and foreshore?
The nearshore is always underwater, while the foreshore is that part of the beach extending from the mean low water line to the highest elevation reached by waves at normal high tide. The backshore encompasses the area landward from the water's reach at normal high tide to the maximum uprush during storms.
What are depositional features?
Depositional landforms are the visible evidence of processes that have deposited sediments or rocks after they were transported by flowing ice or water, wind or gravity. Examples include beaches, deltas, glacial moraines, sand dunes and salt domes.
What is a coastal feature?
Coasts have many different features, such as caves and cliffs, beaches and mudflats. Tides, waves, and water currents (flow) shape the land to form these coastal features. Some coasts are also changed by the flow of glaciers, which are huge rivers of ice, and lava from volcanoes.
Why are coastal features important?
Because coasts are dynamic, or constantly changing, they are important ecosystems. They provide unique homes for marine plants, animals, and insects.
What are coastal features and processes?
Key pointsCoastlines are shaped by a number of processes such as erosion , transportation and deposition .These processes can lead to a number of different types of landforms such as caves, arches, stacks and stumps.Different types of landforms are caused due to several influences such as the geology of the coast.
What is a wrack line at a pier?
The Wrack Line is an area on the beach where players can harvest items that have washed up on the shore. There's even a handy sign next to it that explains what they are and what caused them!
What is the high water line of a beach called?
A landscape marking left by the high water mark of ordinary tidal action may be called a strandline and is typically composed of debris left by high tide. The area at the top of a beach where debris is deposited is an example of this phenomenon.
How is a spit formed 8 marks?
Longshore drift moves material along the coastline. A spit forms when the material is deposited. Over time, the spit grows and develops a hook if wind direction changes further out. Waves cannot get past a spit, which creates a sheltered area where silt is deposited and mud flats or salt marshes form.
What is a berm in geography?
The shingle ridges often found towards the back of a beach are called berms. A pebble beach with a steep profile. The material found on a beach varies in size and type as you move further away from the shoreline.
What is a foreshore in geography?
foreshore in American English 1. the ground between the water's edge and cultivated land; land along the edge of a body of water. 2. the part of the shore between the high-water mark and low-water mark.
What is a shore profile?
A field exercise examining. beach topography and coastal processes. Overview: Working in teams, students conduct topographic surveys (beach profiles) using a pair of Emery rods (profile poles), a metric tape, and a sight level to accurately survey a shore from the foredunes to the waterline.
What is the near shore zone?
What is the nearshore? This is a general term for the shoreline area that encompasses the foreshore (intertidal from the highest high tide to the lowest low tide) and subtidal zones (below low tide zone) to a depth of 10 meters.
Nearshore
Trask (1955) divides the nearshore zone into three regions: below 20 m in depth, a passive zone with little or no sediment movement under normal...
Cross-references
Bars; Beach; Beach Cusps; Beach Processes; Beach Ridge and Beach Ridge Coast; Bed Forms; Coastal Dunes and Eolian Sedimentation; Ridge and Runnel; Ripple Marks; Washover and Washover Fan.
What is the concept of nearshore, beach, and dunes?
For many of you, the concept of the nearshore, beach, and dunes probably conjures ideas such as swimming about in breaking waves, games of Frisbee on a sandy surface, or heavily vegetated mounds of sediment that have to be crossed in order to reach the beach.
What is nearshore geology?
From a coastal geologist's morphological perspective, each of these has a unique definition, where the: nearshore is a broad classification defined as the region extending from the land water interface (shoreline) to a location just beyond where the waves are breaking,
What is beach zone?
beach is defined as the zone of unconsolidated material that extends landward from the low water line to a place where there is a marked change in physiographic form or a line of permanent vegetation representing dunes,
How does a beach's slope change?
Consider what happens as a wave breaks and the swash of the wave runs onto the beach and then returns. As a wave breaks onto a beach, it rushes up the slope of the beach and carries some sediment with it . The energy of the wave is expended due to friction with the surface and the pull of gravity downslope on the beach. As the water of the wave returns downslope, referred to as backwash, it still carries some sediment with it. However, if the beach is very coarse-grained, then the backwash can rapidly percolate into the subsurface and very little water remains to carry sediment back down the beach to the sea. In this case, any sediment carried up the beach by the breaking wave becomes stranded at the landward limit of the breaking wave, and no backwash is available to carry sediment back down to the base of the beach. Alternatively, if the beach is fine-grained and saturated with water, then the backwash cannot percolate into the subsurface, and as the water returns to the sea it carries relatively more sediment with it, leading to a gentle gradient. As a result, coarse-grained beaches with a significant amount of percolation have overall steeper gradients than fine-grained beaches under similar wave conditions.
How do waves affect beaches?
During high energy events, such as large storms or tropical cyclones, waves increase in size and therefore are more capable of eroding sediment from a beach and transporting it either farther offshore or along the shoreline to a new location in very short periods of time. During longer time periods, similar results can occur even during fair weather when low energy waves are affecting the beach. In general, however, most beaches undergo the most substantial erosion and loss of sediment during storm events and then experience a period of recovery to regain a cross-sectional profile that is in equilibrium with the wave and tidal conditions.
