Team

Project owner:

Rovere @

Team members:

Patrick Boyden @

Other Researchers:

...

Project Description

Duration:

1.1.2019-31.12.2021

Problem statement

Ap­pro­xi­mate­ly 125,000 ye­ars ago, the earth ex­pe­ri­en­ced war­mer than mo­dern glo­bal tem­pe­ra­tu­re. Re­fer­red to as the Last In­ter­gla­ci­al (LIG), Ma­ri­ne Iso­to­pe Sta­ge (MIS) 5e re­pres­ents a pe­ri­od of ap­pro­xi­mate­ly +2 °C war­mer glo­bal tem­pe­ra­tu­re com­pa­red to pre-in­dus­tri­al and sea le­vel bet­ween 5 and 9 m above pre­sent. Whi­le the LIG has the po­ten­ti­al to pro­vi­de us with a good pro­cess-ana­lo­gue for fu­ture war­mer cli­ma­tes, the esti­ma­ted 4 m ran­ge of glo­bal sea le­vel in­tro­du­ces lar­ge un­cer­tain­ties in cur­rent cli­ma­te mo­dels and the­re­fo­re in­crea­ses the er­rors in fu­ture sea le­vel rise pre­dic­tions. Ba­sed on the­se un­cer­tain­ties, an in­crea­se in field ob­ser­va­tions of LIG pa­leo sea-le­vel cons­traints is nee­ded.

My PhD re­se­arch the­re­fo­re, fo­cu­ses on syn­the­si­zing a com­pre­hen­si­ve da­ta­set of re­la­ti­ve sea-le­vel (RSL) for the sou­thwes­tern In­dian Oce­an du­ring the LIG. Cur­rent­ly pu­blis­hed data will be sup­ple­men­ted with field ob­ser­va­tions as well as an ana­ly­sis of co­as­tal evo­lu­ti­on through the use of co­ral de­ve­lop­ment and geo­mor­pho­lo­gy evo­lu­ti­on mo­dels. In col­la­bo­ra­ti­on with re­se­ar­chers from CE­RE­GE (Mar­sel­lie) and IF­RE­MER (Brest) in Fran­ce, we look to pro­vi­de bet­ter-cons­trai­ned RSL and sea-le­vel rise ra­tes wi­t­hin the Indo-Pa­ci­fic Ba­sin du­ring the LIG. Most fu­ture cli­ma­te and sea le­vel mo­dels rely upon some sort of ca­li­bra­ti­on to field ob­ser­va­tions. The LIG pro­vi­des the most re­cent geo­lo­gi­cal ana­log to a war­mer world and is the­re­fo­re an in­te­gral part in the un­der­stan­ding of past and fu­ture sea-le­vel chan­ges.

Hypothesis

Working Area