Coasts and their management

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Coasts and their Management

Factors Affecting The Shoreline Environment

The coast is a narrow zone that is especially active in the shaping of landforms. In the coastal zone the sea, land and air all meet together and interact to shape the landforms, which are in turn heavily influenced by human activity also. The shoreline (Küste) is the actual boundary (Grenze) of the land and sea. However, when we study coasts, we usually look a little more widely than the shoreline. Coastal terrains extend inland as far as the seawater, salt spray or wind-blown sand extends. They extend seawards to the depth of wave base, which means the depth to which waves can more sediment on the sea bed.

It follows from this that the width of a coastal terrain in one area may be very different from its width somewhere else. The coastal terrain may be only a few tens of metres wide on steep, rocky coasts, but it could be tens or hundreds of kilometres wide where estuaries move sea water far inland or where there are wide shallow continental shelves. On the high energy coastlines of southern Australia, the wave base may be 20