2018 E.B. Burwell, Jr. Award

Presented to David S. Parks

For: "2015, Bluff Recession in the Elwha and Dungeness Littoral Cells, Washington, USA: Environmental and Engineering Geoscience, Vol. XXI, No. 2, p. 129-146"

Citation by Kathy Goetz Troost

The Edward Burwell Jr. award is given to the author of a “published paper of distinction that advances knowledge concerning principles or practice of engineering geology…” David Parks’ paper on Bluff Recession in the Elwha and Dungeness Littoral Cells, Washington, USA, has proven to be a seminal piece for the Pacific Northwest by advancing our knowledge of bluff retreat and providing useful data based on rigorous, challenging, and extensive field and remote sensing work. This paper is the result of impassioned work by the author to provide the multidisciplinary coastal community with scientific findings relevant for not only coastal hazards but also the near-shore marine environment particularly habitat for forage fish. Parks undertook this lengthy volunteer research effort, to capture transient data. Few papers are available for coastal bluff recession in the Pacific Northwest and most of the completed studies used non-comparable methods. Parks used repeatable and accessible methods to evaluate both short and long-term retreat rates and sediment production. His sites included armored as well as unarmored shorelines and he provides clear documentation that armoring drastically affects bluff recession and sediment volume contributions to the nearshore. Rates derived from Parks’ study reveal an order of magnitude range over nearly 100 years, documenting the local style of bluff retreat being predominantly from medium-scale landslides. His study is serving as a model for similar research in other coastal areas and his results have immediate application for land-use planning and assessment of coastal hazards in bluff-backed environments. Parks, for this paper on bluff recession, also received the “AEG Publication Award” for the most outstanding paper published in any AEG publication in 2015. Both of these well-deserved awards, the Burwell from GSA and one from AEG, reflect the importance and outstanding nature of Parks’ work.

2018 E.B. Burwell, Jr., Award — Response by the David S. Parks

I was shocked and delighted when I learned that I had been awarded the E.B. Burwell, Jr. award for my bluff erosion research. I want to sincerely thank Dr. Kathy Troost for the citation and the Directorate of GSA and the Environmental and Engineering Geology Division for this award.

This bluff erosion research effort began very organically. Between 2007-2012, I participated in extensive forage-fish (surf smelt and sand lance) surveys along the beaches of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Washington State, lead by Dr. Anne Shaffer of the Coastal Watershed Institute. These beach-spawning fish are extremely important because they are a trophic bottleneck between primary production and higher order organisms (e.g., they convert plankton into standing fish biomass that are in turn consumed by fish, birds, whales and humans). The team needed a geologist to characterize beach sediments, so I volunteered. These surveys clearly showed that where armoring (rip-rap, sheet-pile, groins etc.) existed along the shoreline, the grain-size distribution of adjacent beach sediments was too coarse for forage-fish to use for spawning. This research provided a field-based introduction to the role that bluff sediments play in controlling beach sediment characteristics.

In 2012, I received a phone call from a friend who lived on the edge of a coastal bluff. He was concerned because overnight, most of his front yard failed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and he felt his home was about to fall into the sea. He was looking for answers and I was the only geologist he knew.

As I began researching bluff erosion along the Strait, what I found was troubling. Popular wisdom among consulting engineers in the area was based on one or two years of site-specific data and there was a definite absence of comprehensive, long-term, and spatially distributed data to support conclusions regarding the rates of bluff recession.

This research was undertaken to answer three fundamental questions about bluff erosion along the Southern Shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Washington State: “How fast do the bluffs erode”; “How much sediment do the bluffs contribute”; and, “What is the role of shoreline armoring in controlling sediment production in the nearshore Strait of Juan de Fuca”. Both the marine ecosystem and the human environment depend to a large degree on these fundamental questions.

During this same period, two dams on the Elwha River were in the process of being removed resulting in an unprecedented release of sediment into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Defining the volume of sediment produced by coastal bluffs relative to the background rate of sediment production from the Elwha River was another key question that needed to be answered to inform coastal sediment budgets and help guide the long-term management of the shoreline in the Elwha littoral cell.

Many people have contributed to this research over the years, but foremost, I want to recognize Dr. Anne Shaffer of the Coastal Watershed Institute in Port Angeles. Washington, who provided the inspiration and opportunity for these important questions to be answered. Wendy Gerstel, Matt Brunengo and Keith Loague provided helpful reviews that contributed to the success of the paper. Dr. Abdul Shakoor nominated this paper for the 2015 Research Paper of the Year for Environmental and Engineering Geoscience. Thank you all.

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