Sandy Bay (Devon)
| Sandy Bay | ||
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 Looking east across Sandy Bay to Straight Point. |
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| Waters | English Channel | |
| Land mass | Great Britain (island) | |
| Geographical location | 50 ° 36 '27 " N , 3 ° 22' 3" W | |
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| width | approx. 1 km | |
The Sandy Bay is about two km wide bay near Exmouth , in the county of Devon , on the Channel coast of England .
location
Sandy Bay is about sixteen kilometers south of the city of Exeter , four kilometers southeast of Exmouth and about eleven kilometers southwest of Sidmouth .
The rocks of Orcombe Point form the western end of the bay . To the east it is bounded by the Straight Point headland , used by the Royal Marines as a firing range. Further east are the small bays Otter Cove and Littleham Cove as well as the pebble beach of Budleigh Salterton .
Sandy Bay is a popular bathing spot on the Devon cliffs and there is a large holiday home area in close proximity to the beach .
geology
The steep coast of the English Channel in East Devon and Dorset is one of the natural wonders of the world. From Orcombe Point to Old Harry Rocks , a 155 km long coastline, the first country in the UK by extending UNESCO for World Heritage declared. The cliffs of Sandy Bay are part of what is known as the Jurassic Coast . The storage room that received the sediment series from the Jurassic Coast at that time is the so-called Wessex Basin .
The Jurassic Coast rock strata tilts slightly to the east. The geologically oldest rocks are therefore in the westernmost section of this coastal geotope . The mean age of the rocks gradually decreases towards the east. The natural outcrops along the coast form a largely continuous sequence, ranging from deposits of the Triassic , through those of the Jura to those of the Cretaceous period, and represents a geological period totaling around 185 million years.
Orcombe Point, located at the west end of Sandy Bay, is the starting point for the "walk through time", the march through time along the Jurassic Coast. Therefore you are here in the geologically oldest part of this world natural heritage.
The red rocks on the cliffs of Sandy Bay consist mainly of reddish-brown silty claystones of the "Exmouth Mudstone and Sandstone Formation" (roughly translatable as "Exmouth Clay and Sandstone Formation"). This lithostratigraphic unit in turn belongs to the "Aylesbeare Mudstone Group" ("Alyesbeare Mudstone Group"). The mudstones were deposited in a river plain in the late Permian and / or the early Triassic under semi-arid to semi-humid climatic conditions. The Exmouth Formation is closely related to some important Permian and Triassic sedimentary series in Central Europe, both in terms of its origin, its age and its petrography . B. with the Tambach formation of the Thuringian Forest or the red sandstone, which is widespread in Germany .
The sequence in the cliff at Sandy Bay is part of the type profile of the Exmouth Formation.
When the sea is stormy, the clay particles washed off the cliff by the waves turn the sea water in this stretch of coast red. The coarser washed-out sediment particles, i.e. the sand, settle relatively close to the cliff and have formed a beach that slopes so gently towards the sea that it connects to Exmouth Beach beyond Orcombe Point at low tide .
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Dorset and East Devon Coast . UNESCO World Heritage Center. 2001. Retrieved October 19, 2010.
- ↑ a b Data sheet of the Exmouth Mudstone and Sandstone Formation in the British Geological Survey's online encyclopedia of named rock units
- ↑ Detlef Mader: Braidplain, floodplain and playa lake, alluvial-fan, aeolian facies and palaeosol composing a diversified lithogenetical sequence in the permian and triassic of South Devon (England) . In: Aspects of Fluvial Sedimentation in the Lower Triassic Buntsandstein of Europe. Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences . tape 4/1985 , 1985, pp. 15-64 , doi : 10.1007 / BFb0010515 .