A raised beach, marine terrace, or perched coastline is an emergent coastal landform. Raised beaches and marine terraces are beaches or wave-cut platforms raised above the shore line by a relative fall in the sea level.
Around the world, a combination of tectonic coastal uplift and Quaternary sea-level fluctuations has resulted in the formation of marine terrace sequences, most of which were formed during separate interglacial highstands that can be correlated to Marine Oxygen Isotopic Stages (MIS) (for example, Johnson and Libbey (1997).
A marine terrace commonly retains a shoreline angle or inner edge, the slope inflection between the marine abrasion platform and the associated paleo sea-cliff. The shoreline angle represents the maximum shoreline of a transgression and therefore a paleo sea level.
Read more about Raised Beach: Origin, Tectonical and Or Eustatical Use of Marine Terrace Sequence, Other Coastal Quaternary Morphologies Registering Uplift, World Wide Occurrence
Famous quotes containing the words raised and/or beach:
“It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,—how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)