Saturday, May 20, 2017

5/20/17 Report - Why Nor'easters Move More Sand and Coins: A Small Scale Video Illustration.


Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Erosion I Found Yesterday

It is not often that I am able to capture such as good image of such a basic and important thing. Usually I don't have my camera, or the batteries or dead or for some other reason I just can't capture the image in a way that shows what I really want to show.

Yesterday when I was out I hunting, I saw the above little eroded cliff. I made a very short video that shows how water hitting the beach at a sharp angle slices away the sand.  That is something I often talk about, especially as it relates to Nor'easters.

This erosion is on a very small scale, but the small scale and the clarity of the water, worked out for the better.  The same thing you see in the video below happens on the beach on a much larger scale when the surf is larger.  I think you can see from that video how the water slices along the front of the cliff.

Here is the link to the video.  Take a look.  It is only nine seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8aCk1zC0e4

Notice how the water speeds along the face of the cliff.

I suggest running the video and few times and watching how the water skirts long at the base of the cliff.

At the end, you see multiple steps in the sand.  The steps were created as the tide went down.  Some steps are greater than others because there were times when the waves were bigger.

Below is a an illustration of the eroded area and the neighboring beach. The general direction of the water adds sand in one place and removes it in another.  If the direction of the waves changed, the sand would be removed and added at different locations.



The curve in the beach is important.   To the right of the illustration, sand was accumulating.  It was only eroding where the water was hitting at an angle (orange line).

The water hits the cliff and bounces back off the cliff.  That water bouncing off the cliff then gets pushed along the face of the cliff by incoming water.  On the leading edge of the rushing water, you see a little swirl created where the wave pushes the water that is bouncing off the cliff.

I was glad I caught that on video.  I often see something I want to talk about, and for one reason or another, don't catch it on video.  On this small scale, it was pretty easy to see what was happening.

The movement of sand on the beach is multi-directional.  How the incoming and outgoing water interact is important.

When the water hits at a sharp angle, as in the video, there is a redirection of water as the outgoing water hits the incoming water.  When it is hitting at a sharp angle, there is not so much of a collision as when the water is washing directly up and down the slope.  When the water is hitting at a sharp angle, there is more of a combining and redirection rather than a collision that severely reduces the force of both the incoming and outgoing water.  In some areas it actually appeared that the two sources added together and added to the overall force.  There were times when the incoming and outgoing water combined to create a swirl that moved along the beach near the front of the combined sources.  The sand appeared to suspend more in the area of the swirl.

Clip From Another Video Segment
In the above illustration you can see the direction of the incoming water, the outgoing water and the area where they were gathering (arrows).  That area is where there appeared to be the most sand suspended, for the area at the base of the cliff when the water hit it with some force.  The swirl moved parallel to the beach for a short distance.

As I've discussed when I talked about trigger points and drop points, what is moved by the water is determined by the amount of force.  The small amount shown in this video moved sand but would not move coins - other than those that might happen to fall out of the bank.  If you understand the movement of sand and other objects on a beach you'll know better when and where to look for coins.

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This looks like it would be a good read.

The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th-Century to the Present Day Hardcover – July 14, 2005, by Bella Bathurst.

Unfortunately you don't get much of an online preview, but here is the link.

https://www.amazon.com/Wreckers-Killing-Plundered-Shipwrecks-18th-Century/dp/0618416773

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The most read post of April was the 4/27/17 Report - More On Cooper's Treasure Show. Salvage Lease Process In The Bahamas. Blog Provided Touch of Home to Deployed Detectorist.

People have been going back and reading a lot of the old posts.

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Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net