Matthew is working toward becoming an Eagle Scout. He also enjoys surfing, skimboarding, fishing, and skateboarding. "To help people understand the incredible gifts of the natural world," Matthew would like to become a marine scientist someday.
Geotubes are huge flexible tubes filled with sand that are designed to preserve beachfront property from erosion. Matthew found while working on a previous project that Geotubes protected land behind them but accelerated shoreline erosion. He hypothesized that coastal structures other than Geotubes would work better against such beach damage.
Matthew built a wave tank and filled it with water and sand, generating waves to create realistic underwater sand contours. He designed various models of erosion control and exposed them to routine waves and storm simulations. After each test, he rebuilt the beach. He tried two kinds of Geotubes, a curved seawall, reef balls, a reef-ball/Geotube combination, beach rocks, and submerged rocks. He also exposed the beach to the wave test without a structure and ranked the other test results against this referent. Reef balls worked the best, acting as mini-breakwaters and sand catchers. The other structures lost sand. Beach rocks failed in storm waves. Submerged rocks did better against storm surf but poorly overall. The curved seawall and the reef ball/Geotube combination worked somewhat better than the rocks, and all worked better than the Geotubes alone.
