1.

If you've ever been to the beach, you've been on a coast. The coast is the land along a
sea. The boundary of a coast, where land meets water, is called the coastline.

Waves, tides, and currents help create coastlines. When waves crash onto shore, they
wear away at, or erode, the land. But they also leave behind little parts of the sea, such
as shells, sand dollars, seaweeds, and hermit crabs. Sometimes these objects end up
as more permanent parts of the coastline.

Coastal changes can take hundreds of years. The way coasts are formed depends a lot
on what kind of material is in the land and water. The harder the material in the land, the
harder it is to erode. Coastlines of granite, a hard rock, stay pretty stable for centuries.
Sugarloaf Mountain, on the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is made mostly of granite
and quartz. It has been a landmark for centuries.

The famous White Cliffs of Dover, in England, are made of calcium carbonate. This is a
soft material and erodes easily. However, it exists in such great quantities that years of
erosion have not made a visible impact on the coastline. The White Cliffs are a
landmark of the English coast of the English Channel. (The other coast is French.)

The sandy coastlines of islands, on the other hand, change almost daily. The island of
Mont Saint Michel is only an island when the tide is in. It is part of the coast of France
during low tide. Islands are also the site of Earth's newest coastlines, like a Tongan
island created in March 2009 by the eruption of the volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga
Haapai. The "Big Island" of Hawaii, created by five volcanoes, sometimes expands its
coastline when one of its active volcanoes, Mauna Loa or Kilauea, erupts. If lava flows
reach the ocean, the lava cools and forms new coastline along the Pacific Ocean.

Tides, the rise and fall of the ocean, affect where sediment and other objects are
deposited on the coast. The water slowly rises up over the shore and then slowly falls
back again, leaving material behind. In places with a large tidal range (the area
between high tide and low tide,) waves deposit material such as shells and hermit crabs
farther inland. Areas with a low tidal range have smaller waves that leave material
closer to shore.