Coasts, they form some of the U.K.'s most beautiful and inspiring landscapes.
Places of interaction between the land and ocean, and between humans and the physical processes that shape and change our landscape.
We're on a journey along the most dynamic and fastest eroding coastline in Europe, the Holderness Coast.
From Flamborough Head at its northern point to the Humber Estuary, we're going to look at the natural processes that affect this landscape and also the people who live and work along the coast.
Every year on the Holderness Coast, the sea erodes and transports around three million cubic metres of material.
That's enough sand, gravel, and rocks to fill Wembley Stadium three times over.
All this material is then transported south, by coastal transport processes.
The material ends up 60 kilometres away at Spurn Point in the Humber Estuary, where it is deposited to form a huge sand spit.
As geographers and scientists, we want to understand why this happens, what are the processes that erode rock and transport all this sediment over 60 kilometres down the coast.
How do those processes shape the iconic coastal landforms that we see?
How do they affect the lives of people who live along the coastline?
(calming music)
We begin our journey here, at Flamborough Head, the only chalk sea cliffs in the north of England.
These cliffs are made from rock that formed between 70 and 90 million years ago.
How do we turn a coastline made of hard rocks like these into tiny particles that can be transported by the sea?
And how do we see that process at work along this coast?
It all comes down to the erosive forces of the ocean and the weather, which are continually attacking the coastal zone, or littoral zone, the area affected by coastal processes.
This is what makes this part of the landscape a very high energy environment.