An Introduction

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University working on a project called: North Atlantic sea level variability over the past half millennium.  It is a project run jointly between Plymouth and Durham Universities and the National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool.  It is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/) for three years. 

The aim of the project is to reconstruct in detail the sea level changes over the past 500 years around the North Atlantic.  To do this, we use the microscopic plants and animals burried sediments deposited at six salt marshes in the North Atlantic (see map below).  These salt marshes act as geological tide gauges. 

Salt marsh sites around the North Atlantic.

Modern tide gauges around the North Atlantic provide a record of sea level changes over the last 200 years, at the longest, and most only cover the last 100-20 years.  The salt marshes therefore can extend these records further back in time.  Using these records we aim to understand whether similar magnitude sea level changes around the North Atlantic occur at similar times, i.e. whether sea level changes around the North Atlantic are synchronous, or not.  We also want to find out if there were fast episodes of sea-level rise in historical times, similar to those observed more recently by tide gauges and satellites. Such episodes could signal, for example, a sustained response to changes in polar ice-sheet dynamics, a process which is poorly constrained in IPCC sea-level predictions for the 21st century.