How and Why is Sheringham Protected from the Sea?

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How and Why is Sheringham Protected from the Sea?

The settlements of Sheringham, Cromer, Overstrand, Trimingham, Mundesley, Bacton, Walcott and Happisburgh all sit atop the cliffs, as does the Natural Gas Terminal at Bacton. Together these developments include a huge number of properties and associated infrastructure that would be destroyed if natural cliff retreat were allowed to continue. To avoid the major financial and social implications of these losses, defences have been constructed to limit coastal erosion and protect coastal developments. Sheringham is on the east coast of England in North Norfolk.

    Sheringham is a town in North Norfolk; its service is tourist resort. It uses many services to attract the tourists to Sheringham such as a historical train station, a boat museum and a special cheese shop. These on average attract about 4500 visitors a year to add to the 7296 people last known living there in 1991. As well as the tourist shops Sheringham is also full of many services for the local people including solicitors and a hardware store.

Pie Charts of the service shops and tourist attractions:          

   Although the pie charts show something about the services and tourist attractions in Sheringham, there were a few faults in the collecting of data. One fault was that because the information gathering was done in groups there may be more of the service written down because two groups may have written down the same shop or service. Also the whole of Sheringham was not covered in the exercise so there may be some small shops missing from the data. In conclusion there were many of both types of services, but overall there were much more of the local services than the tourist shops and attractions. Also there was a surprising amount of variety of needed services like grocery stores which means there is quite a large sphere of influence which means that Sheringham is used by all the outlying villages for its food and services.

Why Erosion is so Bad

     The North Norfolk coastline is primarily composed of Quaternary deposits underlain by chalk bedrock. The Chalk is composed of calcium carbonate, which comes from the remains of microscopic marine organisms that lived in a warm shallow sea that covered this area during the Cretaceous period, between 62 and 132 million years ago. Chalk is a soft rock but is relatively more resistant to erosion than the other deposits found on the North Norfolk Coast. The chalk is visible in the base of the cliffs at Weybourne, while between Sheringham and West Runton it is exposed as a wave cut platform at low water. From there the chalk falls to below low water just west of Cromer Pier while, to the east of Cromer, the chalk bedrock is not exposed on the East Anglian Coast again. Newlyn. Between Sheringham and Mundesley, chalk can be seen in the cliffs. This is not chalk bedrock and instead consists of large pieces of chalk (termed rafts or erratics) that have been removed from the bedrock by the action of ice sheets (during the last 2 million years). Subsequently these rafts were deposited along with the other glacial material that makes up the cliffs. Associated with the chalk are bands of flints. The flints are made of silica, which also originates from marine organisms that lived during the Cretaceous period. Over time and with help from immense pressures in the earth, the silica was concentrated in pores in the chalk and formed the bands of flint that can be seen in the chalk exposures. As the chalk is eroded the flints are released and, because of their hardness, they remain and accumulate on the beaches.

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    The Crag formation is overlain by a succession of shallow-water deposits known as the Cromer Forest Bed Series (or Kesgrave formation). The Forest Bed series contains various layers of clays and sands deposited under both freshwater and marine conditions. The deposit represents a complicated series of Pleistocene climatic events that terminate at the beginning of the Anglian Glacial stage. The Forest Bed series is particularly well known for its fossils. When, during Glacial stages, ice sheets and glaciers spread over the ground they erode, transport and deposit huge quantities of material. However, once the ice melts and ...

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