PART II: LITERATURE REVIEW 



22. From the earliest investigations of beach morphology, the study of 

 profile change has focused to a large extent upon the properties of bars . A 

 wide range of morphologic features has been classified as bar formations by 

 various authors , and different terminology has been used to denote the same 

 feature. The literature on beach profile change is vast, and this chapter is 

 intended to give a chronological survey of results relevant to the present 

 work. 



Chronological Survey of Literature 



23. Many of the first contributions to the study of bars were made by 

 German researchers around the beginning of this century. Lehmann (1884) noted 

 the role of breaking waves in suspending sand and found that profile change 

 could occur very rapidly with respect to offshore bar movement. Otto (1911) 

 and Hartnack (1924) measured geometric properties of bars in the Baltic Sea, 

 such as depth-to-bar crest, distance from shoreline to bar crest, and bar 

 slopes. Hartnack (1924) pointed out the importance of breaking waves in the 

 process of bar formation and noted that the distance between bar crests 

 increased with distance from shore for multiple bars, with the depth-to-bar 

 crest increasing correspondingly. 



24. Systematic laboratory modeling of beach profile evolution appears 

 to have been first performed by Meyer (1936) who mainly investigated scaling 

 effects in movable bed experiments. He also derived an empirical relationship 

 between beach slope and wave steepness. Waters (1939) performed pioneering 

 work on the characteristic response of the beach profile to wave action and 

 classified profiles as ordinary or storm type. He concluded that wave 

 steepness can be used to determine the type of beach profile that developed 

 under a set of specific wave conditions. The process of sediment sorting 

 along the profile was demonstrated in the experiments in which the coarser 

 material remained near the plunge point and finer material moved offshore. 



25. Bagnold (1940) studied beach profile evolution in small-scale 

 laboratory experiments using rather coarse material (0.5-7.0 mm), resulting in 



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