Beach digging. How deep?

[littletwig]

As some of you all know Galveston lost a tremendous amount of beach sand from IKE. I have been to the beaches at Galveston several times since the storm and all the "NEW" sand ( sand that has been added to the beaches over the years) was washed away. What is there is the dark brown/gray base sand.
That's the best I can describe it. When we hunted them since the storm all the coins we found were from the 70's and before, but nothing really old. Now the Parks system has started a renewal project in which they are scraping off the top 2 feet or so of the remaining sand and transporting it to to sea wall area to rebuild the beaches there. These beaches were totally devastated and it weakend the sea wall. My question is, after taking an additional 2 pus feet of sand off of the beaches should I expect to find much of anything or on a really positive note will I be more apt to find really old stuff? Hope Hope Hope.

 

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[Tom_in_CA]

My 25 yrs. + beach storm/erosion experience will cause me to answer your question in this way: A "tractor" scrape of whatever amount of feet, off a normal beach, will not aid your old coin hunt in any way. Now if a tractor scrape of a given amount of inches off a turfed park were performed, it may be a totally different story. This is because parks/turf/land are normally absolutely stratified (ie.: everything is stratified, and the deeper, the older, and at a certain point, you go below all human influence to sterile soil, etc...).

But the beach is totally different: sand has come and gone several times over the decades. So much so that new coins can be shallow (came back "in" with a storm a decade ago) and zinc pennies can be deep (settled there with the same storm a decade ago).

I know it *appears* that ..... when we find old coins ... on the beach, we automatically look at the size of the cut, and assume that "the deeper the better", as IF the old coins we were/are finding are from the deeper stratas of that cut we are looking at. But here's what is actually happening: The erosive "sluice box" action of mother natures erosion is causing 4, 7, or 10 ft (or whatever) of sand's targets to be compressed into the top few inches of remaining, resulting wet sand. So it wasn't *necessarily* that the coins/targets were "all at the bottom strata" of that cut's depth. It was merely that over the preceeding 12 hrs. of high/low tides/storm/erosion, all the ligher sand got "taken out", leaving all the heavier object strewn in patterns were they got left behind.

And sometimes pristine older coins turn up in deeper erosion like that. I'm not convinced they either, were necessarily at the lower depths either. They could be a result of the given storm you are tracking went further *IN* (as opposed to *DOWN*), into the dunes, releasing targets that had never seen salt-water to begin with, and may have been only 2 ft. deep, but "released" onto a fresh cut.

The only exception to all this would be if a storm cut down deep into the wet sand to a strata it hadn't been at before for 50 or 100 years. In that case, you're simply seeing/hearing targets that had been trapped at whatever previous storm scour depth it had reached at some previous generation. In that case, yet, deeper is better.

But for standard in/out storms, and normal cuts and fill-back-ins, your simply getting a compression factor of finds, that would simply be a compilation of whatever was in that 3, 7 or 10 ft. or whatever.

I've seen this all firsthand: I recall in the CA storms of '82-83 (the "100 yr. storm), that there were a few days where EVERY single coin was old. No clad whatsover. It had simply gone below all that. (An occasional memorial that had fallen off the dunes at the top of the cut, but that was it). Now, 20+ yrs. later, I've sometimes seen cuts that are seemingly that same depth as we saw in '82-83. And I recall they are carved in the exact same spots as 25 yrs. ago. But WAIT! why am I getting '70s clad at this depth, coins that have obviously seen 25+ years of salt water? Why not 100% old like in '82-83? It was then that I began to see that I/we were merely getting the "left-overs" of the '82-83 storm, that had been re-packed into the incoming sand, thus jumbled with no date stratification.

There was some deep beach trenching done down at some popular touristy old beaches in southern Ca, a few years back. The trenches were down 6 ft. +, and wide enough to walk in (before pipes or whatever were laid). A few enterprising md'rs. scuttled down into the trenches, just *assuming* that any coin that deep would be old. Imagine their surpise when they encountered clad and tabs (and yes, a few old silver coins) from those depths! How did clad and tabs get that deep? Another factor they were faced with, is that given the amount of "real estate" exposed at those deeper levels, why wasn't it simply "riddled with oldies" like previous beach storms they'd seen 20+ yrs. ago? The reason was simple: They were getting "random" losses, at a given strata, verses "compressed" losses, which mother nature does.

 

[sqwaby]

Are they removing the sand from east beach? It wouldn't hurt to check it out, but I wouldn't spend a lot of time there. I would also try the sand where they are unloading it after the dozer levels it and shuts down for the day, or early Sunday morning, they usually don't work then. My 2 cents