There is a habit of describing sea organisms using land vocabulary, and it causes a persistent misunderstanding about seaweed.
The words used — root, stem, leaf — describe a land…
Coarse material behaves completely differently from sand under waves - it drains, it rolls, it stacks and it sorts - and almost everything distinctive about a shingle beach follows from…
There is a distinction that changes how a whole category of coastal feature should be thought about, and it comes down to whether something is a population or a structure.…
There is a category of object where the useful part is the absence rather than the substance, and netting is the clearest example.
A net is mostly nothing. The material…
The whole subject reduces to one comparison: which rock resisted and which did not. Everything projecting is what held out, everything indented is what did not, and every feature between…
There is a failure mode in any signalling system that is worth more attention than the system itself, and lighthouses have an obvious one.
A light works by being seen.…