For many years there have been discussions in geomorphology about the role of catastrophic events in landscape evolution. Some feel that more change is achieved by the slow and inexorable processes that are difficult to observe and measure -- and others feel that after long periods of stability or quiescence the great disasters that occur now and then (in association with extreme weather events or earthquakes, for example) are the things that really do the hard work.......
I made some posts earlier in the year about Newgale, the damage done to the storm beach pebble bank and the huge changes made on the beach itself, with the 2013-14 winter storms stripping away millions of tonnes of sand and exposing the submerged forest and other deposits beneath.
http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/newgale-submerged-forest-2014-exposures.html
The photos above show another spectacular bit of damage done during the same winter storms -- a massive rockfall on the cliffline to the west of Penycwm which took a great chunk out of the coastal slope and which changed the alignment of the cliffs. The lower photo is the largest zoom I can manage. The thing that interests me most about this is the fact that virtually all the debris (thousands of tonnes of it) has been cleaned away by coastal erosion following the fall. Mind you, there were some pretty big waves at the time, and there were a lot of storms, one after another.......
Similar cliff collapse beneath singer/ performer Kate Bush's coastal cottage in South Devon reported in press. Will cost her loads of money to stave off disaster of losing her property. Engineers may, however, get the chance to rectify further erosion, as Ms Bush has quite a lot of money.
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