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Coastal upwelling is the best known type of upwelling, and the most closely related to human activities as it supports some of the most productive fisheries in the world. Coastal upwelling will occur if the wind direction is parallel to the coastline and generates wind-driven currents.
A marine coastal ecosystem is a marine ecosystem which occurs where the land meets the ocean. Worldwide there is about 620,000 kilometres (390,000 mi) of coastline. Coastal habitats extend to the margins of the continental shelves, occupying about 7 percent of the ocean surface area.
This Integrated coastal zone management example is based on the "move beach seaward" general planning approach which involves both hard and soft engineering methods. This scenario minimizes the maintenance effort and cost by making optimal use of the coastal geography by incorporating natural coastal geographical features in the engineering ...
Coastal geography is the study of the constantly changing region between the ocean and the land, incorporating both the physical geography (i.e. coastal geomorphology, climatology and oceanography) and the human geography (sociology and history) of the coast.
Because land is nearby, there are large discharges of nutrient rich land runoff into coastal waters. Further, periodic upwellings from the deep ocean can provide cool and nutrient rich currents along the edge of the continental shelf. As a result, coastal marine life is the most abundant in the world.
The term coastal zone is used to refer to a region where interactions of sea and land processes occur. [10] Both the terms coast and coastal are often used to describe a geographic location or region located on a coastline (e.g., New Zealand's West Coast, or the East, West, and Gulf Coast of the United States.)
In addition to coastal upwelling, strong upwelling also occurs along the equator. In this case, the Coriolis force is small near the equator as it changes sign between the hemispheres . The westward trade winds then lead to an Ekman transport that moves the surface waters away from the equator in both hemispheres.
They carry warm water from the tropics poleward. Examples include the Gulf Stream, the Agulhas Current, and the Kuroshio Current. Low-latitude western boundary currents are similar to sub-tropical western boundary currents but carry cool water from the subtropics equatorward. Examples include the Mindanao Current and the North Brazil Current.