The 4s Visit Southbourne

On the 14^th of June, the 4’s went to a Geography fieldtrip to Southbourne Beach, to study the groynes and longshore drift.

"When we arrived, we were in four groups, I was with Ms Clarke. Firstly, we made our way to one of the groynes, the groyne that we stopped at was half rock groyne, and half wooden groyne. Our group decided who would do what.

Firstly, we had a talk from Ms Clarke on what we were doing and a demonstration. Then we got started. Six people, all in pairs sat on the beach with a timer set to one minute, and they counted the waves, we had three groups, to make sure that we were accurate. The other half of our group were measuring longshore drift, we had one person throw an orange into the sea, as they did this someone started a 3 minute timer and another person stood in-line with the orange as it landed in the water, after the three minutes was up somebody else stood where the orange ended up to see how far and in what direction the orange had moved.

Next, half of us went onto the west side of the groyne and half to the east side, where we measured the height of the groynes as it went down the sand, and we also measured the beach profile using ranging poles and gun clinometers. After lunch we went to the east side of Southbourne Beach where there are no groynes and repeated the data collection to see if there was a difference.

In our next lessons we will be using ArcGIS and Excel to make graphs and maps of the data to see whether the groynes are effective at reducing longshore drift. I noticed that this is important because behind the groynes were houses which would fall into the sea if the groynes were not trapping the sand effectively, creating a beach to protect the cliff from erosion"

By Olivia (4s)