Soft Rock Shores

Unreliably stable, 'soft' rock shores are sometimes neglected from coastal zone policy, and have a playbook of obscure, sometimes contradictory science.

A coast-type often suffering from 'esoteric' management, I have seen:

• policy unable to discriminate between soft rock and sandy shores.

• counter-productive upper slope stabilisation, and

• massive revetment construction when a bit of drainage probably would have done the trick...

Following Chris Sharples' terminology, soft rock coasts are the epitome of 'slow responders': potentially able to survive for decades to centuries under erosive pressure but sometimes displaying stark shear planes in response to millennial changes (thanks for the demonstration, Peter Cowell!). However, once disturbed, they have no effective recovery, producing one-way evolution. Consequently, the rate of change for a soft rock coast can be a controlling parameter for coastal evolution, particularly on headland-controlled coasts.