Dr. Charles Flagg took another flight over the Breach at Old Inlet on Fire Island on October 6, 2016. The flyover mosaic is available below. Dr. Flagg provided the following report regarding the status of the breach:
As mentioned in earlier notes, the western side of the breach has been remaining nearly stationary since April. This is rather different than what we have seen during the spring and summer of years past when a spit formed off the western shore. By the end of last summer, that spit reached all the way to Pelican Island only to be removed in an early October blow. Most of the changes since then have been in the eastern half of the breach and along the eastern shore. The 2015 October storm that removed the western spit also deposited a lot of sand on the eastern shoreline forming a spit that lasted about a month. That sand seems to have stayed in the breach, expanding the shoals that have long been in the eastern half of the breach, and forcing the main channel farther west. By January of this year, there was clearly more sand accumulating along the beach just east of the breach. This continued into the summer when a series of ridges and runnels moved ashore and into the breach. This process caused the formation of a tidal pond along the eastern shore and the eastern shore extended some 150 meters into the breach. As a result, the minimum width of the breach, from shore to shore, has decreased from roughly 400 meters to about 300 meters.
In the waters south of the breach there have also been some changes. As shown in one of the photos, the ebb shoal has expanded both to the east and west. And the main channel to the south has swung from a westerly orientation, as shown in the January, 2016 photo mosaic, to a more easterly one. The permanence of these changes as well as the expansion of the eastern shore, as the area is exposed to the fall and winter storms, remains to be seen.
Clearly, something different is happening in the breach this year. We have been expecting the eastern shore to move westward for some time as that is what breaches and inlets along this shore do. So perhaps that process is beginning in earnest. We will have to wait and see.
Mark Lang has assembled all the geo-referenced photo mosaics into a kml file that can be viewed using Google Earth. By clicking between images and using the fade in-out button you can clearly see how the inlet is changing with time. An offline version of the KML file is available as KMZ.
For more information, please visit Dr. Charles Flagg’s website.
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