Beach and nearshore facies: Southeast Australia

The morphology, texture and facies sequence on seven sand beaches, located in low, moderate and high wave energy, microtidal environments in southern Australia were investigated using box coring and Scuba observations. Systematic variation in facies occur both within and between the beaches. Low-energy reflective beaches are limited in lateral and vertical extent and in facies to beach laminations separated by coarse step deposits from finer nearshore cross-lamination facies. Moderate-energy intermediate beaches characterised by rip circulation possess increasingly wider surfzones with ridge and runnel and bar-trough facies separating the beach and step facies from the more extensive nearshore sequence. High-energy dissipative beaches may have 500 m wide surfzones containing multiple bar-trough topography. Fine beach laminations with backwash structures grade into 4–5 m thick bar-trough sequences then the extensive nearshore facies. As wave energy increases from low (H_b < 1 m) to high (H_b > 2.5 m) the vertical extent of the beach to nearshore sequence increases from <10 m to approximately 30 m, and the width from 100 m to several kilometres. Consequently one would expect higher-energy paleo-beach sequences to be represented more by diagonal than vertical facies sequences.