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Charleston, SC

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How Beach Nourishment Projects Work

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View the Beach Nourishment Process Interactive Animation

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People in the United States highly prize the thousands of miles of sandy beaches along our nation’s coasts

Our beaches – a precious national resource – help define the physical, economic, environmental, and social fabric of our nation:

Many of us choose to live near a beach. The population in counties along U.S. coasts more than doubled from 1960 to 2000. By 2006, more than one half of all Americans lived in coastal counties, which make up just 17 percent of land in the 48 contiguous states. People are still moving to the coasts, which see 3,600 new residents daily.

Development continues near our nation’s beaches. Over the last three decades, Americans have built 19 million homes in coastal areas, and people are still building – at the rate of 1,500 homes a day. New roads, bridges, and sewers are being constructed to support these increasing populations.

Travelers from diverse economic, ethnic, and racial populations choose the beach over any other American tourist attraction. Each year, our coasts are the preferred vacation destination for an estimated 180 million people, who spend billions of dollars and support more than 2 million jobs. As long as our beaches are healthy, they will continue to lure national and international travelers.

Local, regional, and national economies thrive on the prosperity of American beaches. Coastal watersheds generated a remarkable $6 trillion in 2003 – more than half of the nation’s economy.1 The tourism industry is now the nation’s largest employer and fastest growing economic sector. Shipping and commercial fishing industries also contribute significantly to coastal regions and the nation.

Clean oceans and wide beaches are crucial elements of our environment. Beaches sustain animals, fish, sea turtles, birds, plants, and other wildlife including many rare, threatened, and endangered species.

Healthy beaches not only are important to our quality of life but also protect people and property along the coasts from hurricanes and coastal storms

A beach’s size, shape, and sand volume help determine how well the beach can protect a developed area during a storm. All the various elements of a beach, such as bluffs, dunes, berms, and offshore sand bars – even the width and slope of the beach itself – offer a level of natural protection against hurricanes and coastal storms by absorbing and dissipating the energy of breaking waves, either seaward or on the beach itself.

For thousands of years, the forces of wind, water, storms, sea level changes, and other natural processes have moved the sediments that shape and reshape our coastlines and beaches

These sediments, which range from fine, white sand to coarse gravel and cobblestones, continuously build up, or accrete, only to drift away, or erode, again and again over time in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways. Wind, tides, currents, and waves constantly keep sediment on the move to build up and wear down natural features such as bluffs, dunes, beaches, sand bars, and inlets. Under normal conditions, wind shapes the dry beach and its dunes while tides, currents, and waves shape the “wet” part of the beach.

It is natural for hurricanes and coastal storms – which move huge volumes of sediment through the system – to erode beaches

Storms erode and transport sediment from the beach into the active zone of storm waves. Once caught in the waves, this sediment is carried along the shore and redeposited farther down the beach, or is carried offshore and stored temporarily in submerged sand bars.

Periodic and unpredictable hurricanes and coastal storms, with their fierce breaking waves and elevated water levels, can change the width and elevation of beaches and accelerate erosion:

• Longer lasting storms, which give the waves more time to attack the beach, cause more erosion and sediment transport than fast-moving storms.
• Very intense storms create higher winds and larger waves, inducing more erosion than less intense storms.

After storms pass, gentle waves usually return sediment from the sand bars to the beach, which is restored gradually to its natural shape. Sometimes, however, sediment moving along the shore leaves the beach system entirely, swept into inlets or taken far offshore into deep water where waves cannot return it to the beach. This causes the shoreline to recede, or move farther landward.

Over time, these processes – combined with sea level rise – produce larger waves that break farther landward. In flat coastal areas, beach erosion and shoreline recession can have dramatic consequences to people and property.

View the Beach Nourishment Process Interactive Animation