THE MOST ANCIENT DUNES IN THE 'DELTA DEL LLOBREGAT'

Claire Fontaine & The Grandma in Gavà

Today, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma have visited the Delta del Llobregat beaches from El Prat to Gavà.

The Grandma is a great fan of dunes and it's a great privilege to contemplate them near her home in this wonderful natural place next to El Prat Airport.

The most amazing thing about dunes is not only their capacity of formation but the vegetation that can grow in them and the great quantity of animals that can live in them.

Claire and The Grandma have relaxed on the beach thanks to a great sunny day and the warm temperatures. While Claire was swimming, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her First Certificate Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 2).

More information: Work and employment I & II

The Llobregat Delta, in Catalan Delta del Llobregat, is the delta of the Llobregat river, located near the city of Barcelona, Catalonia. The current delta has been altered by farming, urban development, industrialisation and transport infrastructures such as the Port of Barcelona and the Barcelona El Prat Airport.

The Natural Areas of the Llobregat Delta, in Catalan Espais Naturals del Delta del Llobregat, is a network of protected areas established in 1987 that belongs to the municipalities of El Prat de Llobregat, Viladecans, Gavà and Sant Boi de Llobregat. It encompasses more than 900 hectares over the right margin of the river that have been declared a Special Protection Area as a designation under the European Union Directive on the Conservation of Wild Birds.

Claire takes sun in Gavà

In physical geography, a dune is a hill of loose sand built by aeolian processes, wind, or the flow of water. Dunes occur in different shapes and sizes, formed by interaction with the flow of air or water. Most kinds of dunes are longer on the stoss, upflow, side, where the sand is pushed up the dune, and have a shorter slip face in the lee side. The valley or trough between dunes is called a slack. A dune field or erg is an area covered by extensive dunes.

Dunes occur in some deserts and along some coasts. Some coastal areas have one or more sets of dunes running parallel to the shoreline directly inland from the beach. In most cases, the dunes are important in protecting the land against potential ravages by storm waves from the sea.

Although the most widely distributed dunes are those associated with coastal regions, the largest complexes of dunes are found inland in dry regions and associated with ancient lake or sea beds. Dunes can form under the action of water flow, fluvial processes, and on sand or gravel beds of rivers, estuaries and the sea-bed.

The modern word dune came into English from French c. 1790, which in turn came from Middle Dutch dūne.

Dunes form where the beach is wide enough to allow for the accumulation of wind-blown sand, and where prevailing onshore winds tend to blow sand inland. Obstacles, for example, vegetation, pebbles and so on, tend to slow down the wind and lead to the deposition of sand grains. These small incipient dunes or shadow dunes tend to grow in the vertical direction if the obstacle slowing the wind can also grow vertically.

More information: Espais Naturals del Delta del Llobregat

Coastal dunes expand laterally as a result of lateral growth of coastal plants via seed or rhizome. Models of coastal dunes suggest that their final equilibrium height is related to the distance between the water line and where vegetation can grow. Additionally the height of coastal dunes is impacted by storm events, which can erode dunes. Recent work has suggested that coastal dunes tend to evolve toward a high or low morphology depending on the growth rate of dunes relative to storm frequency. In certain conditions, both low and high dunes are possible, dunes are a system that shows bistable dynamics.

As a dune forms, plant succession occurs. The conditions on an embryo dune are harsh, with salt spray from the sea carried on strong winds. The dune is well drained and often dry, and composed of calcium carbonate from seashells. 

The Grandma & Claire on the beach, Gavà

Rotting seaweed, brought in by storm waves adds nutrients to allow pioneer species to colonize the dune.

These plants are well adapted to the harsh conditions of the foredune typically having deep roots which reach the water table, root nodules that produce nitrogen compounds, and protected stoma, reducing transpiration.

Also, the deep roots bind the sand together, and the dune grows into a foredune as more sand is blown over the grasses. The grasses add nitrogen to the soil, meaning other, less hardy plants can then colonize the dunes. Typically these are heather, heaths and gorses. These too are adapted to the low soil water content and have small, prickly leaves which reduce transpiration.

More information: Nature

Heather adds humus to the soil and is usually replaced by coniferous trees, which can tolerate low soil pH, caused by the accumulation and decomposition of organic matter with nitrate leaching. Coniferous forests and heathland are common climax communities for sand dune systems.

Young dunes are called yellow dunes and dunes which have high humus content are called grey dunes. Leaching occurs on the dunes, washing humus into the slacks, and the slacks may be much more developed than the exposed tops of the dunes.

It is usually in the slacks that more rare species are developed and there is a tendency for the dune slacks soil to be waterlogged and where only marsh plants can survive. These plants would include: creeping willow, cotton grass, yellow iris, reeds, and rushes. As for the species, there is a tendency for natterjack toads to breed here.

More information: Nature

One billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second. That's a cyclical process. As rocks and mountains die, grains of sand are born. Some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone. And as the sandstone weathers, new grains break free. Some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale, into a sand dune.

Magnus Larsson

HOW SAD THE WORLD CAN BE WITHOUT VENICE...

The Beans arriving to the Gallerie dell'Academia

Today, The Beans have continued visiting Venice. The city is under the effects of the climate change and its canals are emptied but the city is as beautiful as always. The family has decided to visit the Gallerie dell'Accademia to contemplate incredible art works like The Vitruvian Man of Leonardo da Vinci.

After that visit, The Beans have tasted fantastic Venetian cookies and have drunk the local coffee while they have been revising some new English grammar like Need/Needn't and the Past Simple with regular verbs.

More information: Need / Needn't & Past Simple

The Grandma, who is in the edge of a depression because she doesn't find Corto, has been reading an interesting post that Daisy Dune wrote in the Daily Mail in March 2017. The author said that:

It may be known as 'The Floating City', but experts have warned that Venice could sink in as little as 100 years thanks to climate change. They say that Venice and much of Italy's Adriatic coastline is at risk of disappearing all together as sea levels continue to rise.

The Vetruvian Man in the Gallerie

The Mediterranean will rise by up 140cm before 2100, according to scientists from Italy and France. In comparison, the sea level has risen by just 30cm in the last 1,000 years.

The researchers, from Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, said the acceleration in sea level rise can be explained by global warming, according to The Local. To understand how sea levels have changed, the scientists studied millstone quarries along the Mediterranean coastline. 

More information: NASA

'The coast of the Mediterranean provides several remnants of ancient coastal quarries, which are now useful to study sea level change occurring during the last millennia,' the scientists said in a research paper.

'Millstones quarries were exploited with same quarrying techniques from rocks like beachrocks, sandstones or similar lithologies, were shaped to be suitable to grind olives, seeds and wheat, to produce oil and flour, or to break apart soft rocks.' Millstones are circular stones that were mined to grind grain in the Stone Age between 4,000 to 2,500 BC.

More information: NYTimes

The scientists studied the positioning of the stone quarries along the coastline to understand how sea levels have changed over the last millennium. They then used modelling to predict how fast sea levels will rise in the future. The researchers found that 33 areas across Italy are at a high risk of disappearing under the sea.

Old memories of The Grandma in Sant Boi

The regions at risk include Fiumicino in Lazio, the Versilia in Tuscany, land around the Po, Fondi, Sele, and Volturno rivers, and coastal areas around Catania, Cagliari and Oristano.

The research was funded by ENEA, the Italian National agency for new technologies, Energy and sustainable economic development. 

After reading this post, The Grandma has talked about other important zones to protect like Delta del Llobregat, els Aiguamolls de l'Empordà and Delta de l'Ebre, special zones which can be affected by the climate change in a closer future.

We must protect our planet, we must respect all the species and work hard for their conservation.

More information: National Geographic

 Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth... these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women's empowerment. 

Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all. 

Ban Ki-moon