Beach Vacation, Beach Education
July 30, 2008
Tim Keyes is a Wildlife Biologist with the Georgia Wildlife Resource Division, focusing on nongame birds. He has been involved with wildlife education, research and conservation for the last 15 years.
This post originally appeard in Creation Care Magazine.
My wife accuses me of disliking the beach. I suppose the accusation is fair enough, though I think it is not so much the beach I dislike, but her way of enjoying it. She enjoys the heat, the coconut-scented lotion, bad fiction, and sunburns from “laying out.” Being something of a nature geek, I appreciate the beach on different terms. One of my earliest childhood memories is actually of a beach. It was the rocky coast of Cornwall in southwest England, and I remember exploring the pools left by the receding tides, trapping all sorts of fascinating creatures, flotsam, and jetsam. This spirit of exploration is still what draws me to the beach and coastlines today, and I prefer the beach during a storm or in winter.
Coastlines and beaches exert a powerful draw. There is something about witnessing the seam marking the meeting of land and sea; a humbling element to watching the ocean. Its size, power, and indifference to us are all valuable reminders of our place within the vast creation. Of course, storm watching on the beach heightens this experience. It makes sense that the disciples’ response to Jesus calming the storm was not immediate gratitude, but even greater fear. Who was this man with power over the crashing seas?
If you look closely enough, you’ll see that coastlines and beaches uncover the geologic processes that shape landscapes around us. Rachel Carson wrote: “In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.” A bit poetic perhaps, but from the structure of the sand itself to the landforms around the beach, much can be learned about the forces shaping our planet. Glance down at your feet. Take a handful of sand and look closely at it. Despite their often peaceful surroundings, grains of sand have many origins, all of them violent. These tiny bits of rock, coral, or shell have been abraded, eroded, tumbled, washed, blown and finally deposited where you sit. Jagged pieces have lived a short life, while smooth rounded grains have suffered the longest.
If you find yourself on an Atlantic beach, you are essentially sitting on tiny bits of silica-rich quartz, the most resistant material left from the eroding Appalachian Mountains hundreds of miles inland. The pure white sands of many tropical beaches tend to originate from limestone (itself derived from the dead bodies of shellfish and corals). Darker sands, sometimes found in Hawaii, are derived from eroded volcanic rock.
Study the landscape around you to learn the ancient history of the area. If there are jagged rocks, cliffs, sea stacks, and caves, you are in a primarily erosional environment, where the destructive forces of wind and water are slowly wearing, eroding, and carving down the landscape. If the landscape is mostly flat and sandy, you are in a primarily depositional landscape, where the materials eroded elsewhere accumulate. These differences typically relate to where you sit on a tectonic plate, whether on the leading side (the active margin) or the side being dragged along behind (the passive margin), and whether the land is sinking or rising in relation to sea level.
Even the existence and shape of the eastern sandy beaches is a result of sediment washing downstream from rivers, and then a complex dance of erosion and deposition from waves, storms, tides, and wind. In areas such as the Georgia bight (the concave coastline that stretches from South Carolina to Florida,) the sand, beaches, and coastal islands are shaped primarily by relatively high tides, and are protected from storms by a wide continental shelf just off-shore in the ocean. Such coastal islands are wide and relatively square. Compare the Georgia bight landscapes to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The Outer Banks are shaped by longshore currents and relatively little tide action. When viewed in aerial photos, they resemble a fragile ribbon of sand stretching for more than 100 miles.
Storm watching on the beach not only humbles us in the face of the ocean, but often lets us come as close as we safely can to watching erosion and deposition at work. The other benefit of coastal storms is that they deliver birds within view of the shore that can typically only be found far out to sea. Jaegers, skuas, noddies, phalaropes, and petrels—the names alone exude mystery. Watching these birds skitter and rip inches from the frothing waves is truly a thrilling experience. Many of these birds rarely see land—charting their existence on the open ocean, covering unfathomable distances over a lifetime. Sooty shearwaters, an abundant oceanic species, cover up to 30,000 miles in a year. Albatross likely best them, with single flights to gather food for their chicks reaching upwards of 5,000 miles. In fact, if you are enjoying the beaches of the northwestern U.S. in summer and happen to see a Black-footed Albatross offshore, it is feeding in order to take food back to its chicks on islands in the Hawaiian archipelago. This seemingly bizarre behavior stems from the fact that the predator-free islands Albatross require for nesting are thousands of miles from the rich feeding grounds of the of the Pacific Northwest.
While not really antisocial, if I am going to run into a crowd at a beach, I would rather it be of birds than people. This, in part, explains my preference for beaches in winter. The beach in winter is a time for shorebirds, sea ducks, loons, and gannets. These birds that breed far to our north spend their winter along or just off our shores. Birds like bufflehead, scoter, and loons rise and fall in the swells; gannets plunge dive far offshore; while sanderling, dunlin, and western sandpiper run back and forth with the waves, foraging for invertebrates at the water’s edge. In transit are the magnificent flocks of shorebirds, wheeling and twisting as one, flashing white undersides and dark backs with each turn.
For those attuned to the finer details, there are all sorts of creatures living in the sands as well. Dark cylinders reminiscent of chocolate sprinkles surround the openings of Ghost Shrimp burrows. Crab holes can often be found. The wrack line at the high-tide mark is always worth exploring for washed-up treasures. If you are fortunate enough to visit a rocky beach, the tide pool offers hours of exploration. Creatures such as nudibranchs, limpets, and anemones are stranded and easy to observe. Watch long enough, especially if you stir the water a bit, and you may see the filter-feeding feet of barnacles sweep the water for tiny particles of food.
So, in a quiet moment this summer on the beach, when your novel begins to drag, pick some of that sand from your shoes and contemplate its origin. Look around the beach for evidence of what sort of landscape you are in, and poke around the shore for wildlife, large and small, that share this boundary between land and sea. The beach, while a great place to relax, is also a perfect place to reflect on the scales of creation—from the massive forces of tides, currents, and wind that shape our world, to the miniscule existence of creatures in the sand. We find ourselves somewhere between the two extremes, and stewards of an often disproportionate amount of power over them both.
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