The Mighty Carmel Bursts Into the Sea

It's always interesting to wander down to Carmel River State Beach and see what's going on. From people to critters to weather to surf to geologic processes, you never know what you'll see...except that you will see something interesting. Over the past two days the morning high tide has blocked the river's flow into the Pacific, thus backing its water up into the lagoon just behind the beach. The lagoon rises, and then after high tide, on both days it has overflowed back into the ocean. The process when the river cuts through the sand berm and reenters the sea is really quite dramatic. At first, the water just trickles over the sand, slowly moving down to merge with the surf. But gradually, more and more water overflows from the lagoon, moving faster and faster, and in just an hour or two, the trickle becomes a torrent as the river gains strength and velocity, and tears away at the sand with amazing speed. In this picture, notice the little stick I've placed in the sand; it's about ten feet away from the river in the background.


This picture was taken just 15 minutes after the earlier shot! In that time the river ate away all but a few inches of the 10 feet of sand that separated the stick from the water. The stick was gone less than a minute later.








The tide was going out, and as the vertical difference between the level of the lagoon and the sea increased, the river carved deeper into the sand, dropping more and flowing faster and faster, roaring like a stretch of rapids up in the mountains. It carried scads of sand from the lagoon and beach to the ocean, and as it gouged its channel to the sea, standing waves would set up. Here's a nice set of them. These waves would only last a minute or two at most before dissipating, but then they would quickly redevelop, usually in a different area of the channel as the configuration of its bottom changed.

Here, a few minutes later, the river is raging, shredding the beach, roaring furiously in a torrent of whitewater as it meets the sea. When I arrived at this spot, the river was a few yards wide and a foot or two deep. You could stroll across it. In about an hour and a half, it had become a good twenty yards wide, probably at least six feet deep in the center of the channel, and the sand banks at its edge had increased in height from a few inches to about six feet. Anyone trying to cross would have been swept into the ocean, where 15 foot breakers posed an additional hazard. It was a dramatic scene!

Close to an hour after this picture was taken, and about two hours after I arrived on the scene, a good part of the lagoon's water had drained into the ocean and the level of the lagoon had dropped four or five feet. As equilibrium between it and the sea was achieved, the flow of the river slowed and the sand erosion and standing waves decreased.