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Firstly, I would like to thank the Coastal Restoration Trust for their support in awarding me one of the postgraduate study awards for this year, this award will go a long way in assisting with some of the financial pressures faced during my study.

The Masters Research project I am working on at Victoria University of Wellington, in conjunction with the University of Auckland, is focussed on taking a geochemical approach to solving a long running scientific debate in the Coastal Science literature; ‘What processes dominate shore platform development along the rocky coast?’ Are they cut through the action of waves or by the sub-aerial weathering of the cliff that backs the shore platform? This is important as we want to identify the suite of processes which represent the baseline conditions for shore platforms. This informs us of how human action in the recent past and going into the future has and will affect these baselines.

To answer this question I am undertaking an analysis of Cosmogenic Nuclide accumulation on two of New Zealand’s prominent shore platforms at the Kaikoura Peninsula and at Okakari Point near the Leigh Marine reserve in Auckland. This method will tell us the long-term history of development for these shore platforms, how old they are, and how fast they form. With this information we can take a numerical modelling approach to work out which processes have been at work on these interesting coastal features, and work out how the sea cliffs respond to changes in sea level and what this might mean for coastal hazards in the future.

So far I have completed field sampling at the two shore platforms and I have almost completed the lab chemistry for the Kaikoura samples, I expect to have the first set of results In July.