Last week, on Tuesday 12 September, our Year 11 GCSE geography pupils travelled to West Wittering on the Sussex coast for the department's first field trip of the academic year. The following report comes courtesy of Year 11 pupil, Zac Fisher:
‘On a lovely, cold, sunny day we travelled to West Wittering Beach, to conduct some fieldwork that we will need for our GCSE Paper 3 exam.
When we arrived, we got into our groups and started our first fieldwork task. For this, both groups worked on a beach profile which consisted of moving two ranging poles 10 metres apart. We measured the gradient of the beach with a clinometer and used a quadrat to investigate the percentage of the different types of sediment found on the beach. We repeated this until we got to the top of the beach.
Afterwards, we were told about how the spit was mostly destroyed in 2004 by a storm. Following this action was taken to allow the spit to re-form. This was done through beach nourishment (soft-engineering strategy) where they planted marram grass which holds the sand in place due to the plant's roots, this means there would be less of a risk of the spit eroding. We evaluated the effectiveness of this by using marram grass and groynes (a hard-engineering strategy) by conducting a bio-polar chart.
Lastly, we completed our final fieldwork task. We used a baton on the end of a string and threw it into the water to measure the distance the baton travelled in 1 minute. This is how we investigated longshore drift at West Wittering Beach.
Thank you to Mr Burrows, Miss James, Mr Cooper, Miss Brett and Mr Canning for organising the trip and taking us there.’
Geography teacher Miss James adds:
'Spending a day on West Wittering beach was a fantastic opportunity for the boys to experience field work and data collection first hand. This will be vital for them for the fieldwork questions in their Paper 3 exam.
Flickr album: Geography West Wittering Trip, September 2024 |
Height: auto |
Theme: Default | Skin: Default Skin
