To investigate beach erosion caused by longshore waves.
Lockwood's Folly Inlet dredging project.
Lockwood's Folly Inlet was once the mouth of Lockwood's Folly River. Today the inlet separates two barrier islands:Oak Island and Holden Beach Isle.
Legand has it that the river
and inlet got their names back in the 1600s when a man named
Lockwood began building a boat on the bank of the river. After months of
hard work, Lockwood finished his boat and pushed it into the river.
The boat floated well but it floated too deep. When he tried to sail into the Atlantic, Lockwood's boat ran
aground on a sandbar at the mouth of the
Lockwood tried and tried to free his boat but it was stuck so tightly in the sand that it could not be freed. He finally gave up and left his boat to rot in the sand. People soon began calling the boat "Lockwood's Folly" and according to the legand, that name became the name of the river and the inlet.
|The same sandbar that snagged Lockwood's boat back almost 400 years ago would still be there today if it were not not for dredging . The sandbar forms when the longshore current carries sand from Oak Island and drops in the gap between Oak Island and Holden Beach Isle. Every few years, the current deposits enough sand in the inlet to clog it again. Could there be a better way?||Dredging is used to remove the sand and open the channel to boats.|
Corps of Engineers has hired you and your partner to study how different
structures can stop or slow the erosion that the longshore current causes.
You and your partners have
been asked to present your results in the form of a poster. The poster
will show the results of your experiments to protect an inlet from
filling up with sand because of the eroding forces of waves hitting a
beach at an angle. Your poster needs two pairs of before-and-after
diagrams. The first pair will show the erosion caused by wave action
without protection. The second pair of diagrams will show how well the
protective feature you tested worked. Your poster needs a title, labels
for all features shown, and a conclusion. Make sure that all words are
spelled correctly and printed neatly; and the drawings are neat and
clean. (IMPORTANT: Identify
which partner completed which item(s) on the
The river name appears on a map from 1671, making Lockwood's Folly River one of the oldest named rivers in North Carolina.
Teachers may click here to see the Teachers Guide for this activity.