There's a blue marker post on the beach that (theoretically — it's almost invisible behind beach grass) shows where one of the pedestrian tracks to exit the beach is.
This morning I took a photo of it, noting it's now half buried in sand.
Here it was on 15 July 2020 for comparison.
@Miraz that happens here when a super high tide come in and buries all kind is stuff on the beach. Kind of looks like your might be shifting sands
@hawaiiboy I love how our beach is different every day. Sometimes we get acres of tiny bits of driftwood 'mulch', other times everything is swept clean. It's never the same…
@Miraz Interesting. Hawaii is more affected by tides and periods of high surf. The upper part of wide beaches above the high tide point kind of stays the same.
@hawaiiboy Stuff above the high tide point tends to stay put, but then sometimes we get big storms that shift that around too, or add another layer. We're on the west coast and in these parts westerlies are dominant, so a big storm can change things a lot.
@Miraz fascinating. We’re on the west side of the island, but predominate weather is on the east side or windward side. The difference in hemispheres.
@hawaiiboy @Miraz We had some minus tides last weekend that revealed rocks I hadn’t seen before. My usual landmark rock stood a couple feet higher than last year. Or, more accurately, the sand was a couple feet lower. It made me wonder about sand level, and how that is measured.
@Miraz @jean. We have a beach called Magic Sands. The sand disappears during the winter and returns in the summer. It gets washed off shore. bigislandguide.com/white-san...
@jean Coastal erosion is a really fascinating part of geological history. (And it's increased rate as a consequence of global warming.) On cape cod there's a beach called Nauset Light Beach that erodes at around 5 feet per year. They've had to move the lighthouse multiple times and theres actually three lighthouses that National Park has completely moved off of the shore and into the forests that they they can be preserved! You can read more about it here! www.nausetlight.org/coastal-e...
(This whole story was the inspiration for a poem I once wrote!)
@thponders I went to college at UNC and visited the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, which eventually was moved for that reason. Here in Tillamook County, a whole seaside resort was built and later disappeared due to a misunderstanding of how sand works. Someone should write the Ballad of Bayocean. 😏
@jean my daughter works for the army corp as a researcher and she was telling me about a group there that transported a huge chunk of natural dune to the lab wave tank to study the ways that the natural grasses and fungi lattice hold the dune together and how the dynamic work better because all their models are so off.
