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Hurricanes and nor’easters that impact New Jersey beaches significantly affect coastal communities. They alter the coastal environment eroding the beaches and dunes that serve a myriad of benefits to residents of the state, including but not limited to natural habitat for coastal ecosystems and recreational opportunities that power a multi-billion dollar tourism industry. Understanding the frequency and intensity of these coastal storms that significantly erode the beach along the New Jersey coastline can help inform a management response to future storms, the effects of which are likely to be magnified by climate change and sea level rise. Here, we propose to collect Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR; non-invasive geophysical equipment used to image the shallow subsurface) data along the beach at Sandy Hook to identify storm-generated sedimentary deposits preserved in the sands of the beach. There should be dozens of these events recorded within the subsurface spanning the past 20 years. Having identified the storm deposits, we will aim to excavate and analyze the sediments that comprise them. Preexisting work has established ways to model storm intensity provided the composition of sediments deposited during storms, and we aim to apply these methods to data collected as a part of this project.
The primary objectives of this project will be to: 1) assist in the collection of GPR data at Sandy Hook; 2) interpret the GPR data to identify the location of storm-generated sedimentary deposits along the beach; 3) collect sediment samples from the deposits associated with the identified storm events; and 4) make grain size measurements of these sediments. This core dataset will serve as a quantitative basis to develop an understanding of how coastal erosion events are recorded in beach deposits. The grain size of a deposit associated with a given event should vary spatially as a function of distance up and across the beach. The spatially variable sedimentological characteristics of the deposits associated with individual events should correspond with the intensity of the storm, and the ultimate aim will be to link the characteristics of the to a record of historical storm intensities reconstructed using sediment transport models and measurements from a local tide gauge and wave buoy.
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