A field experiment of cusp formation on a coarse clastic beach using a suspended video-camera system

Abstract

Cusp formation was continuously monitored on a manually flattened, plane section of a coarse clastic, microtidal, pocket beach on the Pacific coast of Japan using a CCD camera suspended in the air. Vertical video pictures enabled the examination of the temporal change in foreshore morphologies and swash pattern. Boulders on the beach face appeared to have triggered the formation of beach cusps, which gradually and successively grew up alongshore. In 2.5 h, two well defined beach cusps had developed with a spacing of 2.2 and 2.5 m, respectively. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.