Shell Beach Ridge Landscape

This is a landscape consisting of embankment-like landforms that are formed by the accumulation of shells. A shell ridge is also known as clam dyke and is an embankment composed of shell fragments, fine sand and silt on a muddy plain in the coastal zone. They form near the high tide mark and are a reliable marker of an ancient coast. There are three famous shell beach ridges in the world, namely, China’s Tianjin Shell Ridge, the Louisiana Shell Ridge in the U.S.A. and the Suriname Shell Ridge in South America. The Tianjin Shell Ridge is 0.5–5 m high, dozens to hundreds of metres wide and hundreds of kilometres long. It has a convex top with tails on both sides that gradually thin down. From the land to the sea, there are four arrays of shell ridges, including Ridge I, Ridge II, Ridge III and Ridge IV, which run from north to south in a consistent direction along the coast of Bohai Bay. It is a relic of the ancient Bohai Bay coastline that formed when the ancient Yellow River entered...