Artificial Reef
Man is increasingly intervening in the coastal zone through, for example, the construction of offshore wind-farms and coastal defence. These structures have many of the characteristics of artificial reefs. An artificial reef is any structure that is deliberately placed in the sea with the primary objective of reproducing some aspects of a natural reef.
The Loch Linnhe Artificial Reef, completed in 2006, has been designed to facilitate research into the interaction between man-made structures and their environment, including potentially beneficial effects on fisheries and local biodiversity.
The reef complex conists of five groups of six individual reefs deployed in water that is between 12 and 30 m deep. In total 175,000 concrete blocks with a mass of 6,230 tonnes have been deployed. Each of the 30 reef modules consists of 4,000 concrete blocks that are either solid or contain voids.