Academic Minute
2:17 pm
Fri July 22, 2011
Dr. Ilya Buynevich, Temple University - Coastal Geology and the Past
Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Ilya Buynevich of Temple University explains what studying the structure of today's coastlines can teach us about the geology of the past.
Ilya Buynevich is an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Temple University. His specialties include coastal geomorphology, event sedimentology, and marine geology. Before assuming his position at Temple, Dr. Buynevich conducted research on coastal evolution and aeolian landscape dynamics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. At Temple, he teaches physical geology and coastal geomorphology.
Dr. Ilya Buynevich - Coastal Geology and the Past
Much of our understanding of recent environmental changes comes from written records. However, in most parts of the world, such records are limited and imprecise, especially if we go back more than one or two millennia.
To understand long-term changes in climate, landforms, and ecosystems, scientists must rely on a variety of natural archives, including seemingly unreadable formations of loose sand.
We can learn a great deal by reconstructing environmental changes along the world's coastlines that took place over the past 6,000 years. Landforms made up almost entirely of sand can provide valuable information about the natural phenomena. Invasion of sand into coastal settlements, along with erosion during intense storms and tsunamis, cause rapid and dramatic transformations along the margins of continents and islands, operating at much shorter time scales than sea-level trends or century-scale climate changes.
Using state-of-the-art technology, we are now able to x-ray barrier islands and coastal dunes, focusing on distinct signs of extreme events of the past. Our beaches, which bear the brunt of storm attack, preserve scars that can be recognized even when obscured by vegetation or development.
Along the coast of Maine, for example, a series of massive storms have been reconstructed, dating back more than 1,500 years. In another instance, the interaction between humans and the surrounding landscape has been overprinted on climatic patterns, such as the Little Ice Age - a period of dramatic cooling that began 700 years ago. And, using detailed records of stability and activity of the coastal dunes in the Baltic Sea and equatorial Brazil, we are beginning to see similarities in landscape evolution in these vastly different geographic settings.
Our understanding of how common certain natural phenomena are can be addressed only by examining a record that extends beyond instrumental observations and by recognizing patterns in coastal behavior not only regionally, but also globally.