Photo courtesy of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau
W-20: Near Surface Geophysics in the Dynamic Coastal Environment: Crossing the Land/Sea Interface
Friday, 27 September 8:30 - 5:00 pm
Organizers: John Goff and Jeff Paine E-mail Contact: goff@ig.utexas.edu . Through the support of the SEG Near Surface Geophysics Section, EEGS, and the AGU Near Surface Focus Group
The coastal zone is a habitat for much of the world's population, a key economic driver for fishing, shipping, recreation and tourism, and critical wetlands ecology. However, the coastal zone is also a dynamic setting undergoing significant change at many different time scales. Large storms, for example, can restructure coastal morphology on the scale of hours or days. Rising sea level or changes in sediment supply will alter the coastline over decades to centuries and longer. These are human-relevant time scales, and such changes can have major impacts on coastal infrastructure, habitability, and ecology. Human activity also impacts the coast; e.g., hardening of coastlines and inlets, reduction in sediment supply due to damming, or artificial beach replenishment. Both land- and marine-based near-surface geophysical methods can play a significant role in understanding the many processes that impact the coastal zone. For example, laser ranging and acoustic bathymetry and backscatter can be used to actively monitor morphological changes over days to years. Ground-penetrating radar or acoustic reflection can be used to map stratigraphic successions in the coastal zone that are developed over decades to millennia. The goal of this workshop is to highlight the latest developments in application of near-surface geophysical methods to the coastal zone. We will emphasize as well connections between these methods and both the sedimentary geology of the coastal zone and numerical modeling of the impacting processes.
