Understanding sea-level processes, such as ocean tides, storm surges, tsunamis, El Nino and rises caused by climate change, is key to planning effective coastal defence. Building on David Pugh's classic book Tides, Surges and Mean Sea-Level, this substantially expanded, full-colour book now incorporates major recent technological advances in the areas of satellite altimetry and other geodetic techniques (particularly GPS), tsunami science, measurement of mean sea level and analyses of extreme sea levels. The authors discuss how each surveying and measuring technique complements others in providing an understanding of present-day sea-level change and more reliable forecasts of future changes. Giving the how and the why of sea-level change on timescales from hours to centuries, this authoritative and exciting book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in oceanography, marine engineering, geodesy, marine geology, marine biology and climatology. It will also be of key interest to coastal engineers and governmental policy-makers.

Sea-Level Science: Understanding Tides, Surges, Tsunamis and Mean Sea-Level Changes

The early Holocene sea level rise

We consider the long-term relationship between human demography, food production, and Holocene climate via an archaeological radiocarbon date series of unprecedented sampling density and detail. There is striking consistency in the inferred human population dynamics across different regions of Britain and Ireland during the middle and later Holocene. Major cross-regional population downturns in population coincide with episodes of more abrupt change in North Atlantic climate and witness societal responses in food procurement as visible in directly dated plants and animals, often with moves toward hardier cereals, increased pastoralism, and/or gathered resources. For the Neolithic, this evidence questions existing models of wholly endogenous demographic boom–bust. For the wider Holocene, it demonstrates that climate-related disruptions have been quasi-periodic drivers of societal and subsistence change.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/114/49/E10524.full.pdf

Holocene fluctuations in human population demonstrate repeated links to food production and climate.

https://www.sfu.ca/~mcollard/documents/Collard_et_al_2010.pdf

Radiocarbon evidence indicates that migrants introduced farming to Britain

Radiocarbon Dataset and Analysis from Bevan, A., Colledge, S., Fuller, D., Fyfe, R., Shennan, S. and C. Stevens 2017. Holocene fluctuations in human population demonstrate repeated links to food production and climate

Around 8200 calBP, large parts of the now submerged North Sea continental shelf (‘Doggerland’) were catastrophically flooded by the Storegga Slide tsunami, one of the largest tsunamis known for the Holocene, which was generated on the Norwegian coastal margin by a submarine landslide. In the present paper, we derive a precise calendric date for the Storegga Slide tsunami, use this date for reconstruction of contemporary coastlines in the North Sea in relation to rapidly rising sea-levels, and discuss the potential effects of the tsunami on the contemporaneous Mesolithic population. One main result of this study is an unexpectedly high tsunami impact assigned to the western regions of Jutland.

/pdf/the-catastrophic-final-flooding-of-doggerland-by-the-4tl99z1dxv.pdf

The catastrophic final flooding of Doggerland by the Storegga Slide Tsunami.

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/841657/file/6825220.pdf

Marcel Niekus

Papers

The catastrophic final flooding of Doggerland by the Storegga Slide Tsunami.

A Radiocarbon Database for the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic in Northwest Europe