Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.
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| High, Medium and Low Velocity Water Force. |
This is a handy illustration. It goes along with the one I posted yesterday. This one is simpler and less precise, but you can see the types of things that get moved when the water flow is high medium and low. You can put coins and things like that towards the right side around gravel and boulders. As a detectorist you are often looking for areas where sand was moved but things like coins and rings remain. Therefore, gravel and rocks can be a good sign. Of course, we are now talking about old objects, not things that were recently lost.
You are looking for where some stuff has been removed (ie. sand) but other things either were not moved or actually deposited. I've found good things under rocks. Rocks can form a trap. They can slow the water. Things under or around rocks can be protected from the force of the water. Rocks and other obstacles such as reefs, can trap objects very much like the riffles of a sluice box.
The complex thing about a beach is the constantly changing flow of water, due to a large number of factors. Instead of having a constant flow of water, like with a sluice box, you have a very complex situation on the beach where the flow slows as it proceeds up the slope, sometimes reverses, and there might be interaction of successive waves, some coming from slightly different directions.
How an object moves though a material can be calculated. The calcualtions are based upon Resistive Force Theory (RFT). For more about that, here is an article entitled, No more magic' in predicting how objects move through sand and other terrain.
RFT was first developed in the 1950s to describe how objects move through viscous fluids. In 2008, researchers at Georgia Tech found that the theory with some variations could even more precisely describe the force needed to move objects through granular material, which is a much more difficult medium than fluids to model...“The theory is observed to be magically precise but strictly empirical, which means you can test it on sand and, sure, it works in sand. You can test it on glass beads and, sure, it works on glass beads,” Askari says. “But if you don’t have a theoretical foundation for it, you cannot say for certain that it will work for other flowable materials as well without running even more tests. What we accomplished puts guesswork aside and shows roots of this beautiful theory — so no more magic!”...
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Here is a great article on the importance and virtue of stupidity. It is not the kind we usually talk about, but the kind that makes us useful. I'll let the author explain it.
Here is the link.
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There is nothing interesting on the National Hurricane Center map, and the Treasure Coast surf won't be higher than two or three feet.
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Good hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net