For William Birkemeier and his colleagues, just about every day is a day at the beach. Birkemeier is trying to figure out how coastlines keep changing. "There's a lot of mystery in the coast," he said.
Just one mystery is how recently discovered channels on the ocean floor dating back to the Ice Age are affecting beach erosion. Another puzzle has to do with how beaches grow, and then shrink, according to the seasons.
Birkemeier is the director of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Field Research Facility (FRF) near the town of Duck on North Carolina's Outer Banks chain of barrier islands.
There, Birkemeier and his colleagues make daily measurements of the relentless sculpting of the coastline by waves.
On some days violent storms rip entire sand dunes out to sea. On other days the calm surf lulls the sand, grain by grain, back to the beach.
According to Birkemeier, there's a natural rhythm to the process—the sand moves offshore during the stormy fall and winter months and back onshore during the calmer days of spring and summer.
Nearly three decades of daily data on the churning surf have allowed Birkemeier and his colleagues to "begin asking better questions" about how and why coastlines erode, he said.
One of his colleagues is Jesse McNinch, a professor at the College of William and Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science. McNinch points out that the FRF is one of the very few research centers of its kind.
"The greatest thing is, it's a facility on an active, energetic surf zone and beach, which makes it a rare commodity in an extremely difficult place to work," McNinch said.
Erosional Hot Spots
McNinch has spent seven years using FRF's equipment to investigate why some areas of beach erode much more drastically than others.
He had heard stories from summertime beach visitors about hurricanes obliterating the beach in front of one house, while the house next door went unscathed. "I always chalked them up to anecdotal stories with not much science to them," he said.
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
