Hard engineering
Encyclopedia
In civil engineering
Civil engineering
Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including works like roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings...

 of shorelines, hard engineering is generally defined as controlled disruption of natural processes by using man-made structures.

Examples

It is sometimes considered to be the use of concrete breakwalls to limit the amount of coastal erosion on a being or a cliff-face where land is being absorbed by the sea or steel sheet piling to stabilize shorelines and achieve safety along the coastline to limit the amount of sand being transported by longshore drift
Longshore drift
Longshore drift consists of the transportation of sediments along a coast at an angle to the shoreline, which is dependent on prevailing wind direction, swash and backwash. This process occurs in the littoral zone, and in or within close proximity to the surf zone...

.

Effects

It can cause unintended environmental consequences, such as new erosion
Erosion
Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...

 and altered sedimentation
Sedimentation
Sedimentation is the tendency for particles in suspension to settle out of the fluid in which they are entrained, and come to rest against a barrier. This is due to their motion through the fluid in response to the forces acting on them: these forces can be due to gravity, centrifugal acceleration...

-sand deposition patterns, that are detrimental to the immediate human and natural environment or along down-coast locations and habitat
Habitat
* Habitat , a place where a species lives and grows*Human habitat, a place where humans live, work or play** Space habitat, a space station intended as a permanent settlement...

s. Thing that involve hard engineering to make are groynes (a wooden wall to prevent longshore drift) and sea walls for waves to bounce off.
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