Have you cruised south of Cardiff Reef lately and seen the odd makeshift tower and shipping containers on the beach known as George's? Almost looks like a poor man's judging scaffolding for a WQS 1 star event. Well the mystery has been solved with the help of the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper this week. Seems as though the Scripps Institute is doing some research on sand movement on our beaches. Here's the low down:
The coastline from Oceanside to Del Mar is a dynamic zone where untold cubic yards of sand can be whipped into deep-sea refugees, the path of their marine exodus largely unknown. Until scientists can install chips in grains — or turn them radioactive — tracking sand migration requires human eyes. Enter Bob Guza, Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor and sandman emeritus, resplendent on a drizzling Thursday morning in tie-dye shirt and rubber sandals. At Cardiff State Beach, a short jog south of the Kook and a stone’s throw from the Chart House, a cool winter stakeout is taking place. Within an industrial-sized container, the kind you see on decks of ships, a doctoral student under Guza’s mock-gruff command sits in front of a bank of computer terminals. (“She only works half a day,” he says. “From 7 to 7.”) On a rickety tower of scaffolding, a laser camera tracks formation changes on a rain-soaked beach that, if nature were allowed to take its seasonal course, would not be there. Two months ago, SANDAG dumped 89,000 cubic yards of sand on Cardiff State Beach, part of a regional replenishment project. For Guza and fellow Scripps beachcombers, this was granular manna from heaven unloaded on a strip of sand they’d been studying for a dozen years.
They set out to determine, in real time, what effect high tides and winter waves have on the pumped-up stretch of beach as well as the ocean floor near the shore. The goal of the research project — led by Guza and one of his former star pupils, Reinhard Flick, Scripps researcher and staff oceanographer for the California Department of Boating and Waterways — is simple: Watch the sand. Carefully. The technology they’re using is a step up from Radio Shack: a laser scanner that collects data points multiple times a second; acoustic Doppler velocimeter; bathymetric mapping; and a bunch of other sci-fi stuff. Guza, his love of sand gushing, says it’s insane that we spend millions on periodic beach “nourishment” while less than .01 percent of that money goes to measuring what happens to the sand once it’s dropped off. “Our beaches are changing,” Guza says. “We can either monitor them and have a good idea what they’re doing and what happens when we try to fix something, or we can not watch them and do stuff randomly and not know what works.” Long-term, sand is both a scientific and political challenge. Surfers will scare off sunbathers to protect breaks. Cities have to be terrified of rises in the ocean level wiping out houses and infrastructure. Armoring the coast with sea walls is highly controversial. Environmentalists push for coastal retreat at untold human cost. The solution to beach erosion that smells most like apple pie to most noses is sand. In Florida, Flick says, beaches are treated like highways, indispensable infrastructure. No one questions the economic value of sand replenishment after hurricanes. For decades, dammed rivers in North County have withheld their damned sand. The natural order of things has been disrupted. But before we can get smart about replenishment, we have to understand the murky physics of sand. According to Flick, Albert Einstein shook his head when his son, Hans Albert, went into the field. Can’t you think of anything easier? Albert Einstein asked. The East Coast is far ahead in practical research, Guza and Flick agree. But we’re different terrain. A slow-motion hurricane called sea-level rise is coming our way. So if you’re tooling along Cardiff, give a honk to the Scripps wonks staking out the beach. They’re doing bitchin’ work.
