This week Logan Jenkins wrote a startlingly informative post on sand. Specifically he writes about Scripps scientists stake out Cardiff beach to measure sands of time. His source is Bob Guza, Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor and the tour includes Cardiff State Beach where a doctoral student (unamed by Jenkins) works in "an industrial sized container" in front of a "bank of computer terminals." Here is the best chunk of Jenkins' latest:
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.This sounds so rational I can hardly believe it's real. And, it looks to me like the beach sand replenishment is yet another Stocks & Bond legacy that is being questioned.
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.”
