A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
storm beach
A storm beach is a ridge of coarse material thrown up high above the normal reach of the sea by exceptional waves. It sits at the top of a shore as a bank of boulders and cobbles, sometimes many feet above the ordinary high-water mark and set back from it, and it may be built in a single night by one storm and then left untouched for years.
Etymology
The English term is a plain description used in coastal geomorphology. The individual ridges are sometimes called storm ridges or berms, and where a series of them steps down the beach they record successive storms, with the highest and oldest at the back and the newest at the front.
Notes
The sizes involved are hard to credit. Storms on the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Scotland have moved boulders weighing many tons onto cliff tops well over fifty feet above sea level, and the deposits were long assumed to be tsunami evidence until it was established that ordinary winter storms could do it. Storm beaches are also the ground on which shingle plants and ground-nesting terns live, since nothing above the tide is stable enough to grow anything else.