Past Events
It's all relative: the ups, downs, tilting and rebounds, of ancient sea level
12 May 2021
It's all relative: the ups, downs, tilting and rebounds, of ancient sea level
Prof. Pete Burgess, University of Liverpool “It's all relative: the ups, downs, tilting and rebounds, of ancient sea level
Wed 26th May 2021 at 8pm Please register by emailing b.higgs@ucc.ie
Wednesday 26th May at 8pm via Zoom
It's all relative: the ups, downs, tilting and rebounds, of ancient sea level
Prof. Peter Burgess Department of Earth, Oceans and Ecological Science, University of Liverpool
| Sea level sounds like a simple concept, and in some respects it is; we can go to the beach, and observe sea level right there. However, sea level is not constant, it varies through time, especially over geological time. And like many things, we can only measure sea-level change relative to something else, and there is more than one datum we can use. Perhaps most importantly, as we go forward into the Anthropocene with human influence increasingly dominant on Earth-surface processes, sea-level looks likely to rise faster and faster, with potentially grave consequences for many people. So understanding what sea-level change is, how we measure it, and how we can learn more about it from deep-time geology is an important topic. This presentation will discuss how to usefully define different types of sea-level change, explain the various mechanisms of sea-level change and the time scales they operate on, discuss the evidence for and methods to determine sea-level history over geological time, and talk about what we can learn about likely future sea level changes from that deep-time history of sea-level change |