Coastal Features
The depositional environment found where rivers drain into the sea, named after it's triangular shape.
What is a delta?
The distance between high and low tide.
What is the tide range?
The distance over which wind blows over the ocean to generate waves.
What is the fetch?
A current that flows offshore during a falling tide.
What is an ebb current?
Movement of sediment under the influence of a current by rolling or hopping along the bed.
What is bedload transport?
Island arcs, ocean trenches and narrow continental shelves are typical for this type of plate boundary.
What is a collision boundary?
This type of tide regime is experienced during a solar eclipse, but also several times during the season from March to June.
What are spring tides?
This property of a monochromatic wave does not change during wave transformation from offshore to inshore.
What is the wave period?
An offshore-directed current generated in the surf zone driven by alongshore variations in wave setup.
What is a rip current?
Non-linear feature responsible for directing wave-induced sediment transport onshore.
What is skewness?
An elongated sedimentary deposit produced by longshore transport at a location where the coastline abruptly changes angle.
What is a spit?
A tide signal in which only one high and low tide is measured during a 24 hour period.
What is a diurnal tide?
The speed at which wave energy propagates towards the coast. It is also used in determining the shoaling coefficient.
What is the group velocity?
Surf zone currents parallel to the shoreline generated by waves which break at an angle.
What is a longshore current?
This law predicts the settling velocity of small spherical particles in a fluid under laminar flow.
What is Stokes Law?
The section of the nearshore that extends from the breaker zone up to the part of the beach where waves run up and down.
What is the surf zone?
The tide-generating force counterbalancing the gravitational force to keep the Earth on it’s orbit.
What is the centrifugal force?
This trigonometric function relates the inshore wavelength, celerity, and angle of incidence to deepwater conditions.
What is tanh(kh)?
Diverging and converging currents in the swash zone is one possible explanation in the generation of these rhythmic features.
What are beach cusps?
A parameter relating the ratio of the driving and restoring forces acting on a sand grain under the influence of a current.
What is the Shields parameter?