RUI: Boulder beaches—the understudied archive on high-energy coasts

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As sea level rises and high-energy wave attack on coastal infrastructure becomes more frequent, there is a growing need for studies of high-energy coasts, both to understand coastal response to storms and coastal hazards, and also as a resource for engineers as they work to improve coastal protection approaches. Boulder beaches are the tangible record of storms on high-energy coasts, but they have been so little studied that a lack of data and understanding have prevented their integration into coastal modeling. This study will provide a better understanding of how boulder beaches respond to waves over time, contributing to the knowledgebase for sustainable coasts in the face of sea level rise and climate change. Several tiers of broader impacts span education, societal value, and outreach. The investigators will engage undergraduate researchers in every phase of this work with particular attention to diversity and inclusion. The data will be valuable to engineers, because boulder beaches are natural analogues for riprap and rubble, commonly used for coastal protection, performance and failure of which are still being studied. Finally, a collaboration with professional musicians will use percussion and vocal music to produce original musical representations of wave spectra, the generation of large waves by interactions among smaller wave sets, and wave impacts on boulder beaches. Bundled with contextual educational information (written and spoken word, field photographs, models and videos, integrated into presentations and pitched for general audiences), this innovative crossover approach will transmit coastal geoscience information to the general public. The principal investigators, students, and collaborators will measure clast populations and beach morphology—including boulder sizes, shapes, orientations, sorting, and packing, as well as topographic profiles—at twenty-two sites in Ireland, using both hands-on measurements and aerial photogrammetry. They will also quantify bedrock platform erosion using micro-measurements of clast abrasion trails and establish geomorphic context for the relationship between boulder beaches and supratidal coastal boulder deposits. Repeat measurements over multiple years will be analyzed via numerical differencing of photogrammetric DEMs. This will provide detailed and precise records of boulder beach response to storms, at all scales from quantifying changes in beach topography (identifying zones of erosion and/or aggradation), to tracking the movement of individual boulders. This will be the first multi-parametric study of the boulder beach environment, and should generate a synthetic understanding of this complex coastal system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.