Waves and Beaches

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers, and the author for giving me the opportunity to review this book. While I’m not the ideal reader for this book. Most of it went over my head but I still enjoyed it.

This updated edition of a highly technical book read by scientists, surfers and sailors offers new data relating to the sea and climate change. It’s filled with interesting facts, such as about efforts to convert ocean currents into usable power with tidal turbine systems; a history of tsunamis; and shoreline erosion. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I love this book! Having lived by the sea all of my life I enjoy any book about the sea. This book taught me things I didn’t know. Simply wonderful. I recommend it to everyone who is interested in things seashore
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a spectacular book for a wide audience. It has a great deal of detail and includes the mathematical equations behind many of the relationships between the various factors that affect the movement of water and beaches for those readers that really want to know the physics behind wave phenomena. On the other hand, it also qualitatively describes these same phenomena for those readers that want more of an overview and wish to skip the detailed explanations. I would highly recommend this book for anyone that has ever wondered why waves come in "sets"; or where the beach sand goes in winter; or why riptides form and how to recognize where they are before you enter the water. This book is a must-have for the marine enthusiast's library.

This book is a very timely and relevant update to original research by Willard Bascom (based on a book first published in 1963). This book goes into meticulous detail about all aspects of oceans, waves, beaches, etc. - from cities built on sand barriers, to the composition of the sand on beaches around the world. The photos are absolutely gorgeous and emphasizes the power and beauty of oceans. Parts of this book are accessible to a non-scientist reader like me, but other parts are written more for the scientific audience (I quickly read past all of the mathematic equations!).

This book is an important contribution to understanding the impact of climate change and rising sea levels around the world and on our society in terms of living choices, safe drinking water and the insurance industry.

According to the book’s Preface, generations of scientists, surfers, and sailors have used Willard Bascom’s 1964 classic, Waves and Beaches, or its 1979 second edition, to understand the behavior of water waves and beaches. Growing up 1000 miles from the nearest ocean, I was not among those readers. However, I now live on an island along South Carolina’s Atlantic coast, and my interest in ocean science has climbed sharply.

Bascom was not an academic scientist, but a marine engineer, oceanographer, and adventurer whose enthusiasm for the science was communicated through his writing. He passed away in 2000, and decades after the second edition, Kim McCoy and Patagonia (the American outdoor clothing and gear company) have published a third edition. McCoy has added an update of nearly half a century of oceanographic science, the evolution of instrumentation, and a description of planetary climate change – while preserving a substantial portion of Bascom’s original text. I should mention that this edition also includes some stunning photography.

Unfortunately, I found the merge of two purposes and styles to not be smooth. On the one hand it is a science and engineering text, giving equations of idealized and observed ocean behavior. On the other hand, it is also a treatise on global climate change and environmentalism. In particular, in the opening chapters, the climate change topics seem simply inserted, when the overviews might have been wholly re-written. Especially irritating was the insistence that climate change be considered a literal wave. The very first sentence of the book defines a wave to be “an undulating form of energy propagating through a medium,” The human-caused component of climate change we are experiencing at this time involves transition of the ocean, permanent or temporary, but it is not that kind of wave.

Compare for example, the analytical style for both idealized and realized waves:

Wavelength L =( g/2π)T² where g is gravitational acceleration, T is period.
In real oceans of Earth, using metric system, L=1.56 T².

Wave velocity “celerity” C = sqrt((gL/2π)tanh(2πd/L)) where d is water depth
Convenient approximations are used:
• d/L > 0.5 is a deep water wave, tanh(2πd/L) is nearly 1, so C = sqrt(gL/2π)
• d/L < 0.05 is shallow water wave, tanh(2πd/L) is nearly 2πd/L, C = sqrt(gd)
• 0.05 < d/L < 0.5, use full equation
In real oceans of Earth, at steepness of 1:7, wave velocity is 10% more than theoretical value.

Wave steepness H:L, where H is wave height.
In real oceans of Earth, max is 1:7, with a 120° crest angle.

Internal Waves (on boundary layers of waters of different density).
N = sqrt( (gravity/density) x (delta-density/delta-depth) ) where N is buoyancy frequency.
Large N indicates stable stratification.

Wave velocity for Waves of Translation.
C = sqrt(gd) where g is force of gravity, d is depth of water plus wave height.

In contrast, we have campaigning on climate change (Chapter 5) – “like in North Carolina where they passed HB 819 in 2012, have strangely banned policies from being based on climate change predictions. Unfortunately, six years later, in September 2018, Category 4 Hurricane Florence produced large storm surges and inundated much of the Carolina coastline and the offshore islands. North Carolina may have proved it can ignore the findings of climate scientists, but it cannot escape the impacts of climate change. Unfortunately for the US citizens living in these coastal areas, the US federal government has yet to provide a national policy on coast climate change.” … “In many other countries, including the United Kingdom, climate change is being maturely addressed by local councils and environmental agencies.”

Please understand that I actually fully agree with the book’s position on this and other things, but am using it now to illustrate the incongruous directions. I would like a quantified theory relating increased thermal energy of atmosphere and ocean to wave and beach behaviors. I would like a quantified theory relating sea level rise to wave and beach behaviors. Instead, it catalogs natural and man-made disasters of recent history. Climate science is a scientific study, not headlines. To me, it represents a lost opportunity to understand 21st century issues in the same analytical light that Bascom shed in the 1960s and 1970s.

All the joy for me came in the science and engineering text sections. I guess I’m still waiting for the fourth edition. Maybe I could even recommend inclusion of the propagation of acoustic and electromagnetic waves in ocean waters for that future edition.

I read a copy of Waves and Beaches; The Powerful Dynamics of Sea and Coast, 3rd Edition, by Willard Bascom and Kim McCoy in Protected PDF using Adobe Digital Editions, which I received from Patagonia through netgalley.com in August 2021, in exchange for an honest review on social media platforms and on my book review blog. I have learned since, that I was provided a pre-publication version, though the book had been published in March 2021.

I will never look at the waves and beaches the same again. I was fascinate and amaze from the first page at how it all works and I would recommend that anyone who loves the ocean and beaches should read this book. There were parts that I didn't get or had to read a few times to understand but overall I enjoy the book and all of the pictures and illustration that are included will help you to understand the dynamics work. I read it a little at a time so I wasn't overwhelm.

One thing that amazes me the most are all the ships that still sink and all the debris that is hang out in our oceans, I wonder how it effects all the life forms in the ocean. It reminds me of all the space junk that humans has left in space.

I want to thank Patagonia and NetGalley for this wonderful book

I read this book because I have been a beach person since childhood. Today I spend the late Spring and Summer living in a house with a view of Narragansett Bay. The rest of the year is spent in Florida, a short drive to Tampa Bay and the Gulf Coast. I call myself a flatlander, but one with a need to be near the sea. I used to swim along the coast for 45 minute stretches. I was a boater, today limited to kayaking. The coast is a place that provides me with a sense of inner peace that others find in the mountains.

The third edition of Waves and Beaches is an update of a text that the author of this edition notes he read in an introductory graduate course in oceanography. Don't let that scare you off. If you are a boater, whether sail or power, a kayaker, a paddle boarder, a surfer, a fisherman (or woman), or just somebody who loves being on the water or sitting on a beach, this book has a lot to offer.

While there is some simple algebra included to explain key concepts, one need not be a math expert to enjoy the text and the outstanding photos, graphs, tables and other illustrations. The old adage of "a picture is worth a thousand words" applies to those in the book, which offer not only great scenery, but excellent examples of the concepts presented.

McCoy has taken Willard Bascom's text and updated with many references to more recent examples of coastal processes and some brief insights into the implications of sea level rise. But mostly this is a book that addresses Waves and Beaches. I learned things that will be a benefit the next time I am at the beach or in my kayak, on a friend's boat or simply looking at the Bay from my front porch.

The book also includes chapters on beach erosion and coastal engineering methods used to protect those beaches, harbors and low-lying, populated areas. I found these chapters particularly valuable given the effects of hurricanes and storms where I live and the increased need for policies and investments to protect those areas already suffering from sea level rise and those that will in the future.

While I recommend this book to those I've identified above, one must understand that it is written more as a text rather than a non-fiction essay. This brings benefits and detriments for the reader. The material is highly detailed and somewhat technical in some areas, but it also is more exacting to the extent it provides simple algebraic formulas, graphs and lots of examples to describe the various kinds of waves, why they behave as they do, how to measure them, the processes that create beaches, etc.

I want to thank NetGalley and the publishers for providing a copy in exchange for this review.

As previously noted, I’m obsessed with the ocean and am fascinated by waves, particularly rogue waves and other giant ones. I’ll be honest, when I picked this one up, I expected just a coffee table book with beautiful photos and some accompanying text. Boy, was I surprised. Sure, there are beautiful pictures aplenty, but there’s also hard science, interesting stories and anecdotes, and basically everything I ever needed to know about waves.

There are whole sections devoted to Boat waves, rogue waves, the surf, beaches, etc. I could go on for days. I read this little by little at bedtime, and I will definitely be revisiting some of the parts with the more mechanical explanations, equations, and models to better understand those sections. Also, whenever I want, I can just pop it open and look at the photographs. Winwin!