8. Coastal environments

8.1 Coastal processes

• Wave generation and characteristics: fetch, energy, refraction, breaking waves, high and low energy waves, swash, and backwash.
• Marine erosion: hydraulic action, cavitation, corrasion/abrasion, solution, and attrition.
• Sub-aerial processes: weathering and mass movement.
• Marine transportation and deposition: sediment sources and characteristics, sediment cells, and longshore drift.

8.2 Characteristics and formation of coastal landforms

• Erosional landforms: cliffs and wave-cut platforms, caves, arches and stacks.
• Depositional landforms: beaches in cross section (profile) and plan, swash and drift aligned beaches, simple and compound spits, tombolos, offshore bars, barrier beaches, coastal dunes, tidal sedimentation in estuaries, coastal saltmarshes, and mangroves.
• The role of sea level change in the formation of coastal landforms.

8.3 Coral reefs

• Characteristics, distribution and formation of fringing reefs, barrier reefs, and atolls.
• Conditions required for coral growth.
• Threats to coral reefs (global warming, sea-level rise, pollution, physical damage) and possible management strategies.

8.4 Sustainable management of coasts

Case study: candidates must study some of the problems of sustainably managing a stretch or stretches of coastline, and evaluate attempted solutions (including hard engineering and soft engineering).