South Carolina Coastal Erosion Home Project Description Contact: Mark Hansen

In South Carolina, the physical processes responsible for coastal erosion are complex, difficult to measure and complicated by the influence of many tidal inlets. Understanding the relative contributions of processes causing coastal erosion is important to mitigation of beach erosion. However, isolating individual processes is difficult to determine from localized studies. Large scale studies conducted by the USGS in other regions of the U.S. have successfully provided a large context within which to interpret results of smaller-scale studies and have isolated processes which operate on larger spatial scales and over longer time periods.

Online Publications Quaternary Stratigraphy and Depositional History of the Central South Carolina Coast and Inner Shelf: Implications to Coastal Change Short and Long-Term Variability of Ebb-Tidal Deltas: Management Implications

The region of interest extends from Bull Island to Seabrook Island; a shoreline of approximately 60 km centered near Charleston, SC characterized by multiple barrier islands and tidal inlets with a wide range of spatial scales. An extensive foundation of numerous site-specific databases and published studies already exist on portions of the reach. Inlet-beach interactions are known to play a dominant role in short-term changes, and significant historical changes in shoreline and inlet positions have been documented (Sexton and Hayes, 1983). Stratigraphic foundations of the modern barrier islands, inlet systems, and shoreface in the region are believed to strongly influence coastal processes; however, there have been no comprehensive framework studies to verify this hypothesis.

Coastal & Marine Geology Program > Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies > South Carolina Coastal Erosion Study