Shetland Islands Dune Project
In the summer of 2011, Alice and Joe Kelley, along with graduate student, Lee Sorrell, began a 3 year project in the Shetland Islands to study the dune field that buried a community in Quendale in coastal sand in the 17th Century.
The modern beach is stable, but at times in the past, storms or human disturbance allowed sand to blow miles from the coast.
We used ground-penetrating radar to study the internal structure of the dunes as well as to search for new sites.
In other locations in the area there are sand-buried sites going back to Neolithic times. This project will continue in the summer, 2012 with coring.
