Background Video notes for Dorset and Hampshire Coastline.

What has contributed to the erosion of this coastline?

Fetch and wind direction

Stormy sea pounding the cliffs

• These two factors largely control wave energy, the force behind erosion. The power of the waves
depends largely on the distance they have to travel. This distance is called the fetch. The enormous
amount of open water between America and the British Isles enables the waves to gain great power
during their long fetch from the southwest. Furthermore, the most common wind is from the same
direction, adding even greater power to the waves.
• The coast of southern England in Dorset and Hampshire (where the programme was made) receives the
full force of all of this. Thanks mainly to the high wave energy, this stretch of coast has some of the
grandest scenery in the country.

Differential erosion: hard and soft rocks

• Both on a small scale and over large coastal regions, the position of hard and soft rock layers influences
the shaping of the coast. The shapes of the landforms seen in the programme arise thanks to a mixture
of rocks — some hard, some soft — arranged in layers.
• These layers or ‘strata’ of rock are not eroded evenly: hard strata are more resistant, while the softer
ones are eroded more rapidly.
• At Lulworth Cove the harder rock — ‘Portland stone’ — is on the outside facing the sea. This works like
armour, protecting the softer rocks behind from the waves. But the sea is a very powerful force — it
seeks out weaknesses in the outer wall and drives holes through it. Once it has punched its way through
the Portland stone, the water rapidly eats away sideways at the softer rock behind — the clay and sand
layers — until it reaches a barrier, in this case a second wall of harder rock made of chalk strata.
• The result is the shape of Lulworth Cove today.

What evidence is there of Transportation of eroded material and what

landforms has this created?
Longshore drift and moving beaches
What happens to the beach sediment at the water’s edge appears rather haphazard, but in fact there is a
very regular movement going on here. We can see how the beach sediment moves by focusing on a single
pebble.
• A wave rolls up the beach diagonally from the southwest (the direction of the fetch and wave attack),
and takes the pebble with it.
• The pebble falls back as the wave slips away. But it rolls straight down the beach, at right-angles to the
shore.
• This happens again and again, so that the pebble gradually migrates sideways along the shore.
• This movement is called longshore drift.
• The direction of drift is called the downdrift direction, and the opposite direction is called the updrift
direction.
• In places where the coastline bends, the sediment moving along the coast continues in the downdrift
direction. Thus the beach grows out from the shore, forming a feature known as a spit.
• An example is Hurst Castle Spit in Hampshire.

How can a high energy, rapidly eroding coastlines be managed?

Cost-benefit analysis in coastal management
Problem:
• Bournemouth is a major resort town. The appearance of the beach is important to the town’s image as a
modern international centre of business, learning and leisure. This growth in business has made the beach
an even more valuable asset than ever before.
• But Bournemouth has always had a problem holding on to its sand: longshore drift, which is very active
here, tends to carry it away in vast quantities.
Solution:
• To stop this process, groynes were built — wooden barriers to hold back the sand. But wrestling with
nature is an expensive business:
Cost:
• a single groyne costs almost a quarter of a million pounds.
Knock-on effect: Cliff slumping at Barton
• Along the coast at Barton-on-Sea, there is a different problem. Starved of material by the groynes in
Bournemouth, the town’s beach has been reduced to a fraction of its original width.
• In fact, at high tide there is no beach at all.
• Waves act directly on the cliffs.
• Coupled with the local geology — layers of clays and sands — this leads to rotational cliff slumping on a
regular basis.
• Slumped coastlines are very unstable and dangerous and trying to control them is a serious business. Any
kind of coastal protection in areas like this requires huge and expensive engineering works. How much to
spend and where to spend it often depends on a very simple formula: if the clifftop property is valuable,
spend the money; if it isn’t, don’t. This is more or less what happens at Barton.
• To the west of the town there is a fairly heavily defended stretch of coastline, with groynes and
revetments and cliff draining works; these have arrested the erosion, protecting the valuable properties.
• But to the east of the town it would be difficult to introduce an effective coastal protection programme.
The property on the top of the cliffs — mainly holiday chalets — is relatively low-value, and the
management strategy adopted here is simply to pick them up and move them backwards when they get
within an unsafe distance of the clifftop.