The dynamic coast

I've been geeking out lately on Google's Earth Engine time lapse tool, which I first learned about a few years back, and which is a startling accomplishment in and of itself.  Basically Google has hoovered up and integrated every Landsat image ever collected to create a continuous time lapse of the earth's surface dating back to 1984.  While those imagery are fairly coarse resolution (around 30m in most cases), they easily pick up large-scale coastal changes and coastal sediment dynamics (like the above, from the Pysht estuary on the Strait of Juan de Fuca where you can actually see fluvial sediment being transported on-shore over decadal time-scales)...which has led to my geekery with the tool.  Here are a few highlights from coastal Washington (with credit to Hugh Shipman for pointing to many of these awesome locations).



Above, the Elwha, with a few highlights, including of course the massive flux of sediment and formation of new estuary/river mouth bar complexes associated with dam removal, and the formation and transport of a few cuspate foreland type features on the east side of the delta.



oh man, the Dungeness River delta and spit...so much going on.  Westward transport of sand bars off of the delta, extension and evolution of the Spit, on-shore migration of off-shore bars...so very cool.



Grays Harbor inlet...so much going on here.



but maybe not so much as the Willapa Bay inlet, which also features Washington State's slow-moving erosion disaster at the neighborhood/town of North Cove:



Useless Bay on Whidbey Island is just an absolute conveyor belt of sand waves moving along the shallow sub-tidal:



and check out the Stillaguamish snaking into Port Susan:

Its not quite coastal (though it IS related) - watch glaciers on Mt Olympus shrink before your eyes:



And similarly, not quite coastal, but Oso:

Building ROVs on the West End

A team from Forks Middle School presenting their ROV to a group of judges

I am raising my kids on the Olympic Peninsula, and it takes a lot of work to feel like they have opportunities for enriching STEM activities that youth in more urban areas do.  And I'm saying that even though we live in Port Angeles, at 19,000 people the largest community on the Olympic Peninsula.  I can't even imagine what parents and students in some of the smaller and more rural communities on the west end of the Olympic Peninsula must experience.  To help in some small way to provide an opportunity is one of the reasons that I enthusiastically signed on to be a judge for the first ever MATE ROV Satellite competition, organized with help from the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, and held at the Forks, Washington pool on 20 May.

The Expeditioners from Lake Quinault School, presenting their poster.  This team won an award for, "Best Team Spirit" during the competition

This was my first ROV competition, and I must say that I was impressed.  The competition organization is phenomenal, with a rigorous system of rules and scoring.  Even more impressive was the effort put into the contest by the roughly 20 teams in attendance, representing schools from Lake Quinault, Taholah, Forks, La Push, Clallam Bay and Neah Bay.  Most of the teams represented were starting from the same point - in all cases that I saw starting from one of these kits - but from there teams diverged widely in terms of their solutions to the various challenges they needed to deal with.

The poster presentation and ROV for one of the teams from Clallam Bay High School, with some really nice engineering touches.  This team did a lot of trial and error testing, and came up with some innovations.

By way of example, check out this student from Lake Quinault School walk us through his team's ROV design:

So cool...so very cool.  I'm definitely in.