hi guys this is an introductory video to coastal environments and in this video we will be understanding coasts as natural systems and learning about the different coastal zones like other processes in geography such as the carbon cycle and the water cycle coasts also act as natural systems and therefore we can study them using a systems approach there is a separate video covering the major details of systems and their processes but just to recap systems tend to have inputs outputs stores and flows and i'm going to talk about them in relation to coastal systems but if you want more information on exactly how systems work in general then there is an entire video on that coastal systems are also open systems and if you remember from my first video open systems are systems where matter and energy can be transferred in and out of the system so for example within a coastal system matter would be things like sand and sediment and energy is things like waves and wind and this leads us on to the inputs in coastal systems which are things like energy so we have wind energy wave energy tides and sea currents to give you a few examples of inputs then for our components or our stores these are things like our landforms landforms of erosion and landforms of deposition and we also have flows and our flows will be things like wind or water transport so this is when the window water is transporting our sediment and creating landforms but also we have flows such as erosional or depositional processes and it's these processes that work to create our landforms which we will look at in later videos but land of erosion are those which are being kind of removed or degraded and landforms of deposition is where this material or sand or sediment is being deposited and then finally the outputs that we might find in a coastal system would be the accumulation of sediment or either things like the dissipation of wave energy like many other landscapes coastal landscapes are always changing and that's why we always have processes of feedback occurring whether it be positive feedback which is when the effects of a process are amplified or whether they are negative feedback and this is where effects are nullified and this is because systems are always trying to work towards dynamic equilibrium which is a balance between our inputs in our system and our outputs so that the landforms or the stores are remaining balanced and the same however this is not always the case because we find different rates of inputs and outputs and this is what causes feedback cycles to try and regulate the system so an example of negative feedback within a coastal system is this example here relating to the movement of sediment on beaches during a storm event and as i mentioned before negative feedback is when the effects of an input are being nullified which kind of means diminished or being returned to normal so in this feedback cycle we start here with a beach in dynamic equilibrium so this means the beach is in a good balance and then we have sediment being eroded from the beach during a storm this means sediment is being lost from the beach and being pulled out to sea then the sediment is deposited offshore forming an offshore bar an offshore bar is just a bar of sediment or sand out in the sea then when this offshore bar has formed the waves that were originally hitting the coast are now reaching the bar and this is reducing the erosion power of the waves when they reach the beach because obviously they've hit the bar and therefore they're weaker by the time they reach the actual coast and then finally when the storm passes the waves will move this sediment that's in the offshore bar back to the beach where it originally was so as we can see we've had a state of change and then the change has been nullified and it's returned back to normal so that's returning to a dynamic equilibrium through a cycle of negative feedback now we're going to look at coastal zones and these are the zones of coasts and this is important for understanding the rest of the topic as many of these zones will be referred to so it's good to know what they mean and what's being talked about so this is a diagram i've drawn of a coast and as we can see here we have our different zones labeled so we have the entire coastal zone and the entire coastal zone consists of the back shore the foreshore the inshore and the offshore and this is to do with the position of the high water mark and the low water mark and we also have a surf zone a swash zone and a break zone and these are classified as overall the near shore zone so to go into a bit more detail about what these zones exactly are starting with the back shore which we saw was the part which is highest up on in the coastal zone this is between the high water mark and the landward limit of marine activity so that means the extent on the land to which the sea is having an effect on the land and here we only find changes during storms because it's so far up the coast that is not really affected by day-to-day coastal processes so the back shore was this part which is highest up in the coast then we have our foreshore and this region is between the high water mark and the low water mark and we can see this here so this is the bit forwards of the back shore and this is the place where we have the most important zone for marine activity so this is where most of the processes are taking place and we're seeing the most change then we have our inshore section which is even further towards the sea than the foreshore as we can see here this is our inshore section so it's further towards the sea and our inshore section is the area between the low water mark and the point where the waves seas do have any influence on the land so it's almost between the offshore zone and the inshore zone and then the furthest extent is our offshore zone and offshore clearly means that it's not on the land anymore and this is beyond the point where waves would cease to have an impact on the seabed and this place is where activity is pretty much limited to the deposition of sediments so as we see on the diagram our offshore zone is on this side of the coast furthest away from land than the other zones and then we also have our near shore zone and our near shore zone is the area between the high water mark and the area where the waves will begin to break on the shore this is where the waves start crashing on the shore that's what the word wave break means so the initial zone is this whole zone here pretty much consisting of the foreshore and the inshore zone and the initial zone can be broken up into the swash zone the surf zone and the breaker zone so i'm going to go into more details on this now so the swash zone which is the upper part of the initial zone is the turbulent layer where the water after the wave has broken washes up the beach after the wave has broken so it's the really kind of frothy water that you see washing up the beach then we have the breaker zone which is the area on the other side of the inertial zone which is where the wave actually breaks and the area between the swash and the breaker zone is the surf zone and this can be seen here so this is between the point where the waves had broken and before it turns into the swashy material and that's moving up the beach in the swash zone so that is a brief summary of our coastal zones and in the future videos we will be referring back to these different areas so it's always good to understand what is being talked about in reference to this diagram hi guys i hope you enjoyed the video if you're looking for an amazing a-level geography resource join me today in my series of engaging bite size video tutorials see you soon and together let's make a level geography a walk in the park