Wednesday 12th November was an ‘oasis’ for AS Geography students. Their coastal fieldtrip broke up the week nicely as well as it being the only sunny day in what otherwise was a wet, miserable week.
All AS courses have changed this year and have been updated. Other than the introduction of a few new topics, the biggest change on the new Geography course is the increased emphasis placed on fieldwork – students studying for themselves, out in the landscape, what they have covered in class.
The class are almost at the end of the topic of Coastal Environments and have just been looking at issues surrounding coastal erosion and defence. When you think of the Sefton Coast (Southport to Liverpool) and places like Southport or Formby, you don’t usually think of the sea battering the land, people loosing their homes to the sea or huge problems of coastal flooding. However, a massive amount of work is actually done to protect our stretch of coast from flooding and erosion.
- Did you know that human and animal footprints up to 5000 years old can be found in mud and clay at Formby beach?
- Almost all of our local coastline is either a National Nature reserve (NNR) or a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI)?
- Along the coast are found colonies of the rare Natterjack Toad. Formby Point has England’s most southerly colony of Red Squirrels.
- Rare plants such as the Baltic Rush and Sharp Club Rush are only found at Birkdale’s Green Beach, they don’t grow anywhere else in the UK.
- The coast at Freshfield / Formby is being eroded at a rate of up to 5.5 metres per year.
- Most of the land along the coast is protected from flooding by the sand dunes. Much of the land behind is actually below sea level.
- The present rate of sea-level rise is between 1 – 2mm per year & expected to rise to over 5mm over the next few decades.
- In the near future coastal flooding and erosion will become more of an issue for many of us.
Mrs. Hibberd and I took the students, by minibus, to various places along the coast in order to study how it is being managed. We began at Marshside where there weren’t very obvious forms of defence. This part of the coast, north Southport, is actually protected by salt marshes which in places extend 5 km into the Ribble Estuary. Waves break on these marshes and over time the plants trap sediment and built the land up. This ‘natural’ method of defence is known as soft engineering. The next stop at the pier in Southport was very different. A 9 km sea wall was finished in 2002 and cost around £9 million to protect this part of the town and Marine Drive. This obvious construction is referred to as being an example of hard engineering.
We continued to have brief stops along the coast at Birkdale, Ainsdale, Formby and we finished at Hall Road where Anthony Gormley’s statues (Another Place) begin. At each of the six sites the students conducted tasks such as drawing annotated sketches and completing an environmental matrix as well as making notes on the hard or soft engineering techniques used to protect the land.
Overall the students worked very well and gained a greater appreciation of the work being done to protect and manage their local coastline.
Do have a look at the photographs (Geography gallery) taken during the day.
Mr Halewood