Reflections: Wei Qing, Qiyu, Charmaine, Raykal, Rachel Rankine(coastal studies)

Today we went to the beach! YAY!

It was a cloudless day, perfect for the beach. But we went there not for play but for work, though there was play later on.
As usual we packed our lunches and went off to Walton at the Naze. Our aim was to investigate variations in beach characteristics between a managed and unmanaged section of the beach.

A managed section means that the beach there has many structures like groynes (made up of greenhart wood) and breakwaters to trap the sediment and build up the beach. This effectively prevents erosion and there has been no erosion there since 1977.
An unmanaged section means that the beach is , erm, unmanaged.

So we used many new equipment, like a theodolyte, which was used to measure the distance between our line-of-sight and the ground. This was then further calculated to find the distance between the ground at 0m o the ground at 15m. The measurements were used to draw a beach profiles. The objective of this was to systematically assess changes in beach height along a continuous line transect of the beach at each site.
We also did sediment analysis, where we used a sieve to find sediment which were weighed.
To find the percolation rates, we stuck a tube into the sand and timed to see how much water would drain out in 1 minute.

After all that, we had lunch,a sandcastle "competition" and went shopping.

Then we went back and analysed everything we learnt after TEA(aka dinner).

~END~

Note:It was very very very cloudless for the whole entire day. Cool right?