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The New Challenges

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The New Challenges

For the coastal and sea-level community, Project 495 poses several important challenges:

  • To develop new, high resolution, records of Late Quaternary sea-level change and coastal evolution that can be meaningfully compared with the emerging high-precision palaeoenvironmental records from the ice sheets (cores), the oceans (e.g. corals, high-resolution sedimentation cores) and other terrestrial archives (e.g. peat bogs and loess sequences)
  • To develop new methodologies for determining the driving mechanisms behind sea-level and coastal change, including capabilities for coastal and sea-level forecasting. This will require the close co-operation of field scientists, laboratory and theoretical studies from a variety of disciplines
  • To develop new techniques to resolve the importance of terrestrial and oceanic processes in controlling coastal stratigraphic sequences, sea-level change and coastal evolution. Where possible, to explore the opportunities provided by the often rich archaeological record for human activity in coastal areas and coastal catchments
  • To apply these techniques to better understand the timing and magnitude of sediment and nutrient (including carbon) flux from land to ocean, and vice versa, in a wide range of depositional settings and over a variety of timescales
  • To explore the implications of these coastal records for our understanding of existing terrestrial and oceanic records of Quaternary environmental change, including the leads and lags associated with oceanic and terrestrial records. Where possible and appropriate, to develop numerical models to capture these interactions over a range of spatial and temporal scales, in the past and in the future
  • To provide an improved scientific background against which the role of humans as agents of coastal change can better be appreciated. In particular, we will determine the impact of human activity on sediment and water flux on the coastal zone, as well as the effects of land claim and sea defence construction on tidal amplitude. This will have direct tangible benefits for all participating countries by providing improved understanding of the processes which control present and future coastal change
  • To apply the outcomes of this research to the real-world problems of coastal management in developed and developing countries. This will include the development of regional scale predictive models of coastal evolution that will require close co-operation with, for example, members of the geotechnical community. Coastal change in the future will be driven by a combination of local, regional and global processes. Project 495 will seek to better understand these processes, including defining the potential driving mechanisms behind future sea-level change (global to regional changes in vertical sea-level) and shoreline evolution (including sediment budgets and human impacts) at regional to local scales. This will include a focus on palaeo-extreme events, such as storm surges, tidal surges and tsunamis