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Relationship with Existing International Projects

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Relationship with Existing International Projects

IGCP 495 complements several established international programmes, such as the new INQUA Commission on Coastal and Marine Processes, the IGU Commission on Coastal Systems. Other INQUA Commissions with relevance to this project include the Commissions on Palaeoclimate, Stratigraphy and Terrestrial Processes. The project complements, but does not duplicate, research undertaken by INQUA Commission on Coastal and Marine Processes, although opportunities for synergy between the projects will be explored where appropriate (this might, for example, include co-hosting of an annual field meeting). Professor Colin Murray-Wallace, the former leader of IGCP 437, is the new President of the INQUA Commission on Coastal and Marine Processes and is committed to establishing a strong working relationship between INQUA and IGCP projects.

Several other international projects emphasise integrating data from ice cores, ocean cores and terrestrial records (e.g. INTIMATE, Walker et al., 2001) and studying the environmental processes of the ice age recorded on land, in the oceans and by glaciers (e.g. EPILOG, Mix et al., 2001). Another international programme, Land Ocean Interaction in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ), forms part of the International Geosphere and Biosphere Programme (IGCP).

However, none of these address the role of the world’s coasts as archives of local, regional and global environmental change across the full duration of the Quaternary, or as repositories of data from which to understand the driving mechanisms responsible for RSL change, coastal evolution, and land-ocean interactions. INTIMATE and EPILOG pay little explicit attention to the coast, whilst the LOICZ programme is concerned with land-ocean interaction during only the last 2000 years or so. Consequently, coastal stratigraphic sequences are under-utilised, despite forming an archive of critical importance in exploring land-ocean correlations during the late Quaternary.