Abstract
Geomorphic resilience is the capacity of a system to recover to pre-disturbance conditions following a perturbation. The 2013/14 Atlantic winter storm period had extensive geomorphological impacts and provides an opportunity to assess coastline resilience. This paper uses high spatio-temporal resolution data to quantify the beach-dune response and subsequent recovery of a prograding coastline following the 5 December 2013 North Sea storm surge. It demonstrates that despite the high water levels and destructive nature of the storm, the beach-dune system recovered sediment rapidly over the first post-storm year. Within four years the dune advance had exceeded the seawards position expected based on long-term coastal trends but had not yet recovered the pre-storm foredune profile. Cumulative evidence from numerous European locations suggests one of the stormiest periods on record triggered only a minor disturbance to what appear to be highly resilient beach-dune systems.
Highlights
The concept of geomorphic resilience in response to disturbance provides a framework for evaluating the impacts of natural and anthropogenic perturbations to geomorphic systems (Downes et al 2013, Phillips and Van Dyke 2016)
Where long-term coastline trends are controlled by strong morphological preconditioning, including local bathymetry, geomorphology and sediment supply, even high magnitude storm events cause only a minor disturbance to the system (Chaverot et al 2008, Pye and Blott 2016, Phillips et al 2017) which can be described as highly resilient
In other cases the occurrence of storm events themselves may be a primary control on coastal geomorphology due to their frequency, and resilience may hinge on the clustering of storms (Kish and Donoghue 2013, Houser and Hamilton 2009)
Summary
The concept of geomorphic resilience in response to disturbance provides a framework for evaluating the impacts of natural and anthropogenic perturbations to geomorphic systems (Downes et al 2013, Phillips and Van Dyke 2016). Definitions of resilience all refer to the ability of a system to absorb the impact of, and recover from, a disturbance and return to its pre-impacted, or an alternative stable, state (Downes et al 2013) Geomorphic resilience reflects both the magnitude and frequency of disturbance, response time, relaxation time and recovery (Phillips and Van Dyke 2016). This framework has been applied to various systems and the focus here is on coastal response to storm events where the notion of resilience has gained considerable traction (e.g. Houser et al 2015, Walters and Kirwan 2016). Substantial variability in local response to the same disturbance event (Backstrom et al 2015, Masselink et al 2016, Crapoulet et al 2017) suggests sites exhibiting a range of representative antecedent conditions and/or response dynamics are needed as building blocks to support a framework for understanding both local geomorphic resilience and the potential for interactions between different geomorphic (sub-)systems
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