Historical changes in Cow Bay Beach, Halifax County, Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the early 1900s to the 1950s, Cow Bay Beach, also known as Silver Sands Beach, was one of the largest and most popular recreational beaches near Halifax. As many as 5000 people would use the beach on a hot summer Sunday. Recreational facilities included canteens, picnic sites, a merry-go -round and a dance hall. Only minor physical changes in the beach were observed during that period. By 1956, a commercial operation began extracting sediment from the beach for construction of the new airstrip at the nearby Shearwater airbase and for other structures in the Halifax area. Trees were cut down. Power shovels and drag cranes worked along the shore, from west to east, to remove a total of nearly 2 million tons of sediment during the 1950s and 1960s. The resulting collapse of the western beach and expansion of the inlet allowed for the transfer of large volumes of nearshore sediment into Cow Bay Lake. This lasted until at least 1974, when the inlet was nearly closed off again. Sediment excavation was stopped by the courts in 1971. Since the 1950s the 200 metre (m) wide beach with its multiple beach ridges covered by trees has switched to a very low, single beach ridge less than 28 m wide. The seaward edge of the beach has migrated landward from 96 m to just over 200 m in fifty years. ln the process, the foundation of a dancehall, once at the back of the beach, is now seaward of it. After the excavations, the fragile beach began slowly rebuilding until the late1980s. However, it was unable to withstand the impacts of storms during the mid-1990s and so it began migrating rapidly landward. By 2003, waves from Hurricane Juan had cut two channels through the beach, subdividing it into three parts. Since 2005, the landward migration of the central section of beach has accelerated and will continue to do so unless the beach is flattened and submerged below high tide level by storms. If not, it will migrate and build against Moses Island, in Cow Bay Lake. Cow Bay Beach is a striking example of the long-term impacts caused by sand and gravel removal from Nova Scotian beaches, during the post-World War Il construction boom. Beaches are the product of sediment accumulation over 100s and possibly 1000s of years. Sediment supply is therefore limited. Cow Bay Beach is also a reminder of the constant clash between individual property owners rights, and the struggle to protect provincial shorelines for long term public benefits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".