The movement of beach sand—Developments in sedimentology
Marine Geology - ElsevierPublishingCompany, Amsterdam- Printed in the Netherlands
Book Reviews The Movement o f Beach Sand--Developments in Sedimento...
Marine Geology - ElsevierPublishingCompany, Amsterdam- Printed in the Netherlands
Book Reviews The Movement o f Beach Sand--Developments in Sedimentology, 5. JAMESC. INGLE, Jr.
Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1966, 221 pp., 117 illus., 5 tables, Dfl. 40.00, 80 s. Those workers who have chosen the beach and nearshore environment as an area of interest will appreciate Mr. Ingle's book reporting on the use of tagged material as a tool for studying sediment transport close to the coast. The book describes many experiments where natural sands were coated with fluorescent dye and placed in the sea. The location of experimental work was in California on four different beaches. The author describes his sediment preparation, the field technique and how he reduced the data. Results are presented both as a series of diagrams and by discussion. Throughout the book the author discusses pertinent published material. It is a very functional book in that the descriptions of technique are well done. Should an instructor desire to include a short field study using tracers as part of his laboratory or field program in teaching he will find what he needs to know about technique laid out. The writer was impressed by the use of greased cards as a collecting device. This should be better than grab samples because at least you know that the tracer material sampled came from the surface of the bottom. Mr. Ingle was quite aware of the ergodic difficulty inherent in a survey where it is impossible to sample a great many points at the same time. The reviewer's opinion is that the problem of how one reduces all the sample points to a common time has not yet been settled unequivocally. It is known, for example, that the concentration at a point some distance from a point source of a single charge of fine particles will reach a maximum, remain constant for a time, and then become less. This has been found to be so for tagged natural sands. The problem this raises for correcting concentration is that unless you have established the rate of change of concentration at the unknown point you cannot assume a linear correction for concentration with time, i.e. the rate of change of the T s / T a ratio used by Ingle where T s is arbitrarily chosen standard elapsed time and T a is the actual elapsed time really is not known. There are several other aspects of this book which are to be commended. For one thing Mr. Ingle chose to experiment in the field and good quantitative field studies in coastal processes are greatly needed. He has provided data showing the behavior of sand under a great many natural conditions. These data are available for comparison. In short, the reviewer recommends this book as a good teaching tool (the bibliography is excellent), as a guide to experimenters in coastal processes and to the professional engineer and researcher whose field is coastal study. J. M. ZEIGLER(Woods Hole, Mass.)