A WORLD OF BEACHES

Beaches are a treasure—cherished by most, exploited by some, enjoyed by all. Beaches are places for recreation, contemplation, renewal and rejuvenation, communing with nature, and sometimes, while staring out to sea, thinking about our place in the universe. On beaches we swim, surf, fish, jog, stroll, or just lose ourselves in the wonder of where the land meets the sea. Yet for all of our interaction with beaches, few of us understand them: why they are there, how they work, why they show so much variety in form and composition, and why they can undergo dramatic changes in a matter of hours.

CROSSROADS OF HISTORY

Humans have been crossing beaches since the dawn of time, and beaches have been critical to human history and development, as they still are. Unfortunately, much of the history of beaches has to do with invasions, but discovery was also part of the human tide that traversed beaches through history. Julius Caesar landed on Deal Beach near Dover when he invaded Britain in 55 B.C., fifteen hundred or so years before Columbus landed in the New World. In A.D. 1001, Leif Ericksson was the first European to set foot on a beach in Vinland (Newfoundland). King Canute sat on his throne on a beach in 1020 and ordered the tides to come no closer, an early object lesson to demonstrate to his subjects that no man, not even the king, has authority over the sea. The Normans crossed the beach at Hastings, England, in 1066 to defeat the English. The Mongols crossed the beach at today's Fukuoka, Japan, in 1281 to be defeated by the divine wind, a typhoon that destroyed the invasion fleet. The Spanish Armada of 1588 met a similar fate in their attempt to invade England when a great storm blew the surviving ships onto the rocky coasts of the British Isles. Many of the survivors and much debris and treasure washed up on Ireland's beaches. Columbus planted the Spanish flag and a cross in 1492 on the beach at San Salvador in the New World, to the amazement of the natives. In 1519, Hernán Cortés and six hundred of his men crossed the beaches of the Yucatán Peninsula on his way to conquering the Aztec Empire. Australians first met Aborigines on a beach in 1606. In 1619, a Dutch vessel landed twenty slaves on a beach in Chesapeake Bay, marking the beginning of African slavery in America. In 1620, the Pilgrims disembarked in the New World next to a large rock on the beach now known as Plymouth Rock. In 1659, Robinson Crusoe is said to have crawled across the beach on an uninhabited island off the Orinoco River, in northern South America, where he remained for twenty-eight years. The great explorer Captain Cook met natives on the beach in Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands), where they killed him in 1779. And Darwin met naked Patagonians on a cold beach in Tierra del Fuego in 1833.

In 1915, nearly 330,000 total casualties occurred on or very near the beaches of Gallipoli, Turkey, as the Turks beat back the invading Allied forces. Will Rogers died when his plane crashed on takeoff from a beach near Barrow, Alaska, in 1935. And the beach at Dunkirk, France, in 1940 was the scene of the spectacular rescue of the defeated British Expeditionary Force in World War II. In 1944, the direction of the armies reversed as the Allies invaded Europe across the beaches of Anzio, Italy, and then Normandy, France. In the same time interval, beaches across the Pacific were killing fields as the Allies moved against the Japanese, culminating in the atomic bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll, the namesake for the bikini bathing suit, introduced by a Frenchman in 1946. The largest oil spill in history soiled the beaches of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1991, when Iraq purposely released oil to frustrate beach landings by U.S. Marines in the Gulf War. In 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico became the largest oil spill ever to occur in North America.

AVENUES OF COMMERCE

Having been erased by erosion and flooded by the rise in sea level, archaeological sites are less common on today's beaches than they were in the past, but we can guess that early humans used the beach in much the same way as today's third world coastal communities and subsistence cultures do. The beach was their land road, and just as for today's subsistence societies, from the Arctic to the tropics, living next to the beach is living next to one's main source of food. Places near the beach were also dump sites for garbage. Termed "middens" by archaeologists, massive piles of shells are common in many coastal settings near beaches and tidal flats where food resources were common. Today on Bazaruto Island, Mozambique, and in other coastal subsistence societies, local people still contribute to growing shell middens.

From the North Slope of Alaska to the tropical shores of the Pacific in Colombia, beaches continue to be workplaces and storage places for fishing boats, and spaces for net- and fish-drying racks. In the tropics, sea breezes provide relief from the heat and help reduce malarial mosquitoes. The beach itself is a resource for construction material and for whatever bounty the sea delivers. The people of such communities live by the sea by necessity; it is their means of life. With a vista to see who is approaching, a beach provides security. But living next to the beach, particularly on low-lying coasts, presents great risks, as demonstrated by the great tsunami of 2004 that roared across thousands of miles of Indian Ocean beaches and killed 225,000 people—including those who were there by necessity and those who were there by choice.

In contrast to beaches that support subsistence cultures, urbanized shores are mostly characteristic of first world countries. The combination of the shore as a place of commerce and the shore as a place of leisure is probably as old as humankind. The ruins of Roman and Greek villas by the sea attest to a very early resort mentality, whereas ancient Peruvians built massive temples and dug grave sites near their beaches. It was not until the nineteenth century that beaches became a greater focal point for technological and recreational development. In 1801, the first American advertisement for a beach resort (Cape May, New Jersey)...