© Richard BroomeExtreme waves impacting on Chesil Beach in Dorset, UK, were taken on Feb. 5, 2014.
The repeated storms which battered Europe's Atlantic coastline during the winter of 2013/14 were the
most energetic in almost seven decades, new research has shown.
And they were part of a growing trend in
stormy conditions which scientists say has the potential to dramatically change the equilibrium state of beaches along the western side of the continent, leading to permanent changes in beach gradient, coastal alignment and nearshore bar position.
In a study accepted for publication in
Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, researchers compared modelled and measured data from sites across Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Portugal, Spain and Morocco, and showed the
extreme weather conditions were the most energetic since at least 1948.
It showed that along exposed open-coast sites in the UK and France, there
had been extensive beach and dune erosion due to offshore sediment transport with sediment losses of up to 200 m3 for every 1m strip of beach. At some of the other sites, the balance between the different alongshore sediment transport contributions was disrupted, causing changes in the coastal alignment, referred to as beach rotation.
