Marine scour: lessons from nature’s laboratory

Scour associated with anthropogenic activities in the marine environment has exercised the minds of scientists and engineers for decades. Despite the advances in understanding there remain areas of uncertainty which require further examination and challenges that require further research. Whilst real-life scour problems often help formulate the questions for detailed laboratory experiments, the associated information is less often used to answer some of those questions and yet the available data can offer the chance of exploring the scour at full-scale using real marine soils, albeit with all the inherent uncertainty associated with measurements obtained in the field. It can be argued that through the interpretation of these data, it forces the scientist and engineer to not only explore in more detail the limitations of the measurements but to engage in the full range of processes, whether physical (e.g. hydrodynamics and meteorological forcing) or biological (e.g. marine growth, benthic organisms) that impact on structures placed in what are often, very challenging environments.