UKZN students need your help
During the course of their investigation into the boulders, the students made an interesting discovery.
STUDIES of boulders at the Pennington Main Beach took a surprising turn when students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal discovered a memorial stone.
Ellisha Angath, Kreesan Palan, Lauren Pretorius and Lauren Hoyer are currently studying the boulder accumulations south of the main beach. “The boulders are of interest to us as these are storm deposits. The field work entails measuring the dimensions of various boulders and accounting for their shape.
Basically, this data is then used in mathematical equations with the overall objective to determine the magnitude of the storm waves that had resulted in the boulders deposition,” said Honours student Ellisha Angath.
During the course of their investigation into the boulders they made an interesting discovery. “Professor Andrew Green of UKZN spotted the Byrne memorial stone on one of the boulders. The best guess is that the memorial stone could not have been placed in an initial position such as this – as that would be rather awkward,” said Ellisha.
Speculation is that it was washed down during the ‘Tides of March’ in 2007. The stone reads: “In loving memory of K.F. Byrne (02-06-1916 – 03-04-1996) and M.V. Byrne (15-08-1920 – 26-05-2006). Their favoured place.” Perhaps family would like to have the stone taken back to where it belongs.
Thus, Ellisha approached the Mail hoping that someone would be able to shed light on the memorial stone and perhaps reveal its original location. “The source area of this stone could greatly help me in the write-up of this dissertation, as the boulder which now hosts the stone was probably not a boulder to begin with. Rather, a storm plucked out the chunk of rock the memorial stone rested upon to create this boulder which we have now identified in the field,” she said, adding that when she spoke to a few locals they informed her that the current boulder accumulations did not exist around 20 years ago.
“Particularly the southern-most tidal pool area (diagonal from Botha House). One man had said that that was once a sandy beach area,” she said.
Professor Green added the following, “if we can gauge when these storms occur, we can start to compare whether storms are becoming more intense and more frequent as climate changes. This is the aim of Ellisha’s project at Pennington. The memorial stone plays an ideal role in this, as it not only started out somewhere different, but it also constrains when the storm was that uprooted it and redeposited it elsewhere. The actual block is enormous, so knowing some information about when and where it was setup, and when it was destroyed gives us some very precise information on the transport capability of these storm waves, in addition to the timing. This is better than any carbon dating as these dates get less accurate closer to the present day.”
Anyone with information regarding the Byrne memorial stone is asked to contact Ellisha at ella.angath@gmail.com or Professor Andrew Green at Greena1@ukzn.ac.za
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