Europe, Coastal Geomorphology

Excerpt

The coastlines of Europe cover a latitudinal range of 45° reaching from 80°N in Spitsbergen to 35°N in southern Crete, Greece. Thus, nearly all coastal types except for mangroves and coral reefs are present in Europe (Bird and Schwartz, 1985; Kelletat, 1995), including arctic ice coasts with calving glaciers, drifting sea ice contact and permafrost decay along cliffs on Spitsbergen or young volcanic coastlines on the Aeolian islands of Italy or Santorini/Greece. Processes of salt weathering associated with tafoni can be observed at the Costa Brava in Spain and the islands of Corsica and Sardinia or SW-Turkey, biogeneous coastal forms (Laborel, 1987) including vermetid boiler reefs and micro atolls are characteristics on Crete islands (Greece) as well as coastal cementation like aeolianites and beachrocks. Because of the rather long and complicated geologic and tectonic history of the European continent, the coastlines are greatly differentiated. Their total length in natural scales is several 100,000 km. Many of the scientific terms in coastal sciences derive from European examples, like ria, fjord, canale, tombolo, or Thyrrhenian, Sicilian, Calabrien for Pleistocene sea level highstands. …