Hurst Castle Spit

• theory/concept

  • constructive waves deposit material onto beaches
  • the stronger swash puts larger pebbles to the back of the beach
  • percolation of the backwash reduces its energy making it incapable of moving larger pebbles towards the shore
  • however, smaller pebbles can be moved further toward the shore by the weaker backwash, using less energy
• percolation


  water sinks through the beach
• hypothesis


  pebbles get larger to the back of the beach
• sequence of method

  • place poles at every slope, this is better as its hard to get an accurate 10m between each poles
  • use a bucket to pick up random rocks around the pole
  • lay them out from smallest to largest, and chose the middle 11, to get rid of bias
  • measure the pebbles and place results in a table
• type of sampling


  stratified, as it allows us to take enough data
• We judged where the change of slope was ourselves, and sometimes it can be difficult to see. This can affect the accuracy of our results. We could've improved this by using a map with countour lines to show the exact change of height.
• Also, different people were measuring the long-axis of the pebble, meaning it could've been subjective, as people see things differently, meaning its an opinion. This could've been fixed by the same person measuring each pebble, ensuring a more accurate and consistent set of data.
• We didn't end up using the same method of sampling to collect the pebbles, this may be done due to students misunderstanding or mishearing the instructions. To improve this, we could've made sure we all uses the same systematic sampling at each site, we all took a random sample of pebbles and ordered them from smallest to largest, choosing the middle 11 to eliminate bias.