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Coastal geomorphology: trends and challenges

Coastal and Estuarine Research Unit, Department of Geography, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK, j.french{at}ucl.ac.uk

H. Burningham

Coastal and Estuarine Research Unit, Department of Geography, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK

This review highlights recent work in coastal geomorphology that challenges existing wisdom, breaks new ground or contributes in some way to wider principles. Sediment transport by currents and by waves remains a major focus of coastal process geomorphology, and the contribution of this work to our appreciation of landform dynamics is particularly evident at the beach scale. Reconstructive studies over Holocene to historical timescales are yielding new insights into the adjustment of coastal sedimentary systems to progressive environmental forcing, high-magnitude events and human activities. Coastal geomorphology is currently buoyed by opportunities afforded by the implied threats of climate change and sea-level rise, and by the conceptual and technical challenges of predicting morphodynamic behaviour at the all-important `engineering' scales. Of some concern is the lack of dialogue with other major strands of geomorphology. One of the main challenges, to create models capable of revealing emergent aspects of spatially distributed interactions between form and process, is common to all geomorphologists engaged with the meso-scale. Yet coastal specialists seem reluctant both to draw inspiration from and also to contribute ideas to what might be seen as a single, extremely broad, research front. More generally, there is little exchange of ideas or contribution to a shared intellectual endeavour. Coastal geomorphology is at the forefront of the discipline when it comes to the exploitation of new environmental instrumentation and remote sensing technologies. It can only be hoped that the plethora of high-resolution multitemporal data sets will contribute to the advance of geomorphological thinking rather than merely being used to constrain sediment budgets as a basis for the management of localized erosion problems.

Key Words: coasts • environmental change • estuaries • landform evolution • morphodynamics • morphometry • reduced complexity modelling • topographic survey.

Progress in Physical Geography, Vol. 33, No. 1, 117-129 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0309133309105036


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