Where the sea meets the land
Wherever the sea touches land, whether it’s the edge of a tiny island or
the coast of a continent, there is almost always a beach.
A beach is a stretch of sand, pebbles, or mud. The sea makes beaches.
Waves, crashing into a rocky shore for thousands of years, toss the
rocks around, breaking them into pebbles. Then, for hundreds or
thousands of years more, the waves grind the pebbles together. In time,
the pebbles are ground into tiny grains of sand. Lakeshore beaches are
also formed in this way.
Where a river flows into the sea, a beach is usually made of mud. That’s
because the river carries mud along with it. The river dumps the mud at
the edge of the sea, where it piles up and makes a beach.
