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A tetrapod is a form of wave-dissipating concrete block used to prevent erosion caused by weather and longshore drift, primarily to enforce coastal structures such as seawalls and breakwaters. Tetrapods are made of concrete , and use a tetrahedral shape to dissipate the force of incoming waves by allowing water to flow around rather than ...
A wave-cut platform, shore platform, coastal bench, or wave-cut cliff is the narrow flat area often found at the base of a sea cliff or along the shoreline of a lake, bay, or sea that was created by erosion. Wave-cut platforms are often most obvious at low tide when they become visible as huge areas of flat rock.
Coastal erosion may be caused by hydraulic action, abrasion, impact and corrosion by wind and water, and other forces, natural or unnatural. [3] On non-rocky coasts, coastal erosion results in rock formations in areas where the coastline contains rock layers or fracture zones with varying resistance to erosion.
Without the constant presence of water, stacks also form when a natural arch collapses under gravity, due to sub-aerial processes like wind erosion. Erosion causes the arch to collapse, leaving the pillar of hard rock standing away from the coast—the stack. Eventually, erosion will cause the stack to collapse, leaving a stump.
Eroded material gets carried away by the wave. Wave pounding is particularly fierce in a storm, where the waves are exceptionally large, and have a lot of energy. It is an important engineering consideration in the construction of structures such as seawalls and dams. Wave pounding is a force of erosion along coast lines.
A marine terrace represents the former shoreline of a sea or ocean. It can be formed by marine abrasion or erosion of materials comprising the shoreline (marine-cut terraces or wave-cut platforms); the accumulations of sediments in the shallow-water to slightly emerged coastal environments (marine-built terraces or raised beach); or the bioconstruction by coral reefs and accumulation of reef ...
After the wave breaks, it becomes a wave of translation and erosion of the ocean bottom intensifies. Cnoidal waves are exact periodic solutions to the Korteweg–de Vries equation in shallow water, that is, when the wavelength of the wave is much greater than the depth of the water.
On a cliffed coast made up of material which is only fairly or even hardly resistant to erosion no wave-cut platform but a beach is formed in front of the sea cliff. If waves carve notches at a narrow point on both sides of a promontory on the rocky cliffed coast, a natural arch may be formed. [ 4 ]