Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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Wave Photo by Clark Little Photography Source: clarklittlephotography.com. |
Although it seems like coins and rings and things sink in the sand, they don't sink in undisturbed dry sand without some disturbance of the sand. You can easily prove that for yourself. Just take a bowl or container of sand and place a coin or ring on top of it. You can come back days later and clearly see that the item did not sink.
When you say a object sinks in sand, that seems to me to imply gravity as the primary force, which is misleading because the sand has to move to allow the object to "sink." Maybe to you that is not an important distinction, and I can accept that, but for me, I'd rather place more emphasis on what has to happen with the sand. That is what we have to know more about in order to be able to explain how an object will sink at the beach.
When you say a object sinks in sand, that seems to me to imply gravity as the primary force, which is misleading because the sand has to move to allow the object to "sink." Maybe to you that is not an important distinction, and I can accept that, but for me, I'd rather place more emphasis on what has to happen with the sand. That is what we have to know more about in order to be able to explain how an object will sink at the beach.
Clark Little takes amazing photographs of waves, like the one shown above. If you visit ClarkLittlePhotography.com you'll see many great photos.
The above photo, besides being beautiful, shows some very interesting things. Notice the brown area that the person is standing in. There is brown all around the person, and there is also a brown vertical column in front of the camera.
The brown around in front of the wave shows that a lot of sand has been suspended by the turbulence. And the brown vertical column, shows how sand has been picked up into the wave. It seems clear that a lot of sand is being moved in that photo.
We don't often see a wave that big on the Treasure Coast, but the same thing happens with smaller waves, though to a lesser extent. On the Treasure Coast we don't get waves like that, but the waves we do get will do the same thing - move sand. And sometimes the waves do get pretty big.
Here is another great photo by Clark Little. Once again, you can see the sand being sucked up into the wave.
The brown around in front of the wave shows that a lot of sand has been suspended by the turbulence. And the brown vertical column, shows how sand has been picked up into the wave. It seems clear that a lot of sand is being moved in that photo.
We don't often see a wave that big on the Treasure Coast, but the same thing happens with smaller waves, though to a lesser extent. On the Treasure Coast we don't get waves like that, but the waves we do get will do the same thing - move sand. And sometimes the waves do get pretty big.
Here is another great photo by Clark Little. Once again, you can see the sand being sucked up into the wave.
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Photograph by Clark Little. Source: ClarkLittlePhotography.com. |
As I've said many times, different materials and objects require different amounts of water force to move. With a waves shown in these photographs a lot more than sand could be moved.
Here is an interesting explanation from Wikipedia explaining how sand fleas bury themselves.
Here is an interesting explanation from Wikipedia explaining how sand fleas bury themselves.
Emerita is adept at burrowing, and is capable of burying itself completely in 1.5 seconds. Unlike mud shrimp, Emerita burrows tail-first into the sand, using the periopods to scrape the sand from underneath its body. During this action, the carapace is pressed into the sand as anchorage for the digging limbs. The digging requires the sand to be fluidised by wave action, and Emerita must bury itself in the correct orientation before the wave has passed to be safe from predators.
As the tides changes, Emerita changes its position on the beach; most individuals stay in the zone of breaking waves. This may be detected by the physical characteristics of the sand. As the tide falls, the sand is allowed to settle; when Emerita detects this, it uses the temporary liquefaction from a breaking wave to emerge from its burrow, and is carried down the beach by the wave action. Longshore drift also drag Emerita laterally along a beach.
Crashing waves cause liquification of the sand. It burrows into the liquified sand, which settles when the tide recedes.
When you are talking about objects sinking into the sand, a number of things are going on. Like I said above, it requires some disturbance of the sand. In some cases that disturbance might be little more than sand moving away, while the denser objects remain. When the sand is liquified, denser objects can actually sink into the sand, but that requires special conditions. It does not happen unless the sand is being disturbed in one way or another.
In the near future, I plan to discuss some of the other variables and forces pertaining to how objects sink or appear to sink into sand.
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Neural networks and AI could be a lot of help to the treasure hunter, but it would require a lot of research and development work, and access to the technology and data. For me the most valuable thing about going through years of higher education was access to technologies, labs and data. I could have done without the classes and lectures. In fact, the thing in education that probably changed my life the most was discovering computers in 1969.
I started with batch processing, which involved punching computer instructions on punch cards, which were then submitted to the computer center. You'd go back to the computer center in a day or two to get the output (you think your computer is slow). As often as not, what you got was a listing of the many errors in your program that had to be identified and corrected before submitting the program again and waiting another day for the output.
I'll never forget the day I discovered a teletype machine that allowed me to use interactive BASIC to enter programs. You'd hit a key and wait about two seconds before seeing the character typed on the computer paper on the teletype in front of you. The delay in response took some getting used to but it was miles ahead of batch processing. You know the rest - personal computers and then the internet.
If the general population had access to the most advanced technologies and data, progress would be accelerated many times. If people had access to the raw data and information, there would be all kinds of genius geeks looking at the data.
A lot of things are accomplished by amateurs despite the barriers. That is very true with archaeology. Professionals have their own domain to protect and they seldom appreciate the talent that is sitting out there in the world. Did you ever get a job when you were way beyond the person that would be your boss? It won't happen.
In a very rare event about a week ago, a reporter actually asked a follow up question of Dr. Fauci, that elicited some useful information. Dr. Fauci had mentioned in a very general way that something wasn't working, and the reporter asked what that was. Whoooaa - a reporter actually doing their job. Dr. Fauci said that contact tracing wasn't working because certain populations weren't responding to the calls. In a moment of unguarded candor, he described those populations, but I won't. I knew that very useful information was too politically incorrect to ever be mentioned in public again. It wasn't.
Do you realize that a lot of the people at the top of the health agencies have been there longer than Moses wandered the wilderness?
The point I'm making is that the public only gets filtered information at best. I'd love to see more good data put out there for the public to access. Just yesterday I noticed a TCPalm headline that said something like 80% of corona cases are from minority populations. I found some demographic breakdowns on the Florida Dept. of Health site and their numbers suggested nothing like that headline.
I don't do Facebook or Twitter. I'm not much interested in the party line, the slogans, mantras, talking points or retweeted retweets.
I do very much like the idea of using neural networks and AI for contact tracing, but am personally more interested in tracing ideas and treasures than viruses, although that would be fun too if the data collection was more systematic and well defined.
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| Source: nhc.noaa.gov |
Seems like the National Hurricane Center map is becoming a little more active. Maybe we'll get some nice waves someday before long.
Tropical wave five is moving away from us and there is another area that has a small chance of developing in the next couple of days.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.n