Coastal areas are among the most dynamic elements of the physical landscape, strongly influenced by both short-term (e.g., catastrophic meteo-marine events, human impacts) and long-term (e.g., tectonics, climate change, volcanic activity) forcing factors. Therefore, the study of coastal proxies can offer a series of benchmarks for estimating processes and associated timescales.
Among the most studied processes in coastal areas are relative sea-level changes. Any landscape feature whose environment of formation is linked to a former sea level can be used as a sea level index point (SLIP). SLIPs can be of different types: geomorphological (e.g., marine terraces, shoreline angles), biological (e.g., coral reef terraces), sedimentary (e.g., beach deposits, saltmarshes or beach ridges).
Although there is a comprehensive understanding of the relative sea-level changes during the Holocene, our knowledge of such dynamics during past interglacials remains limited. This session invites the international sea-level community to present studies broadly related to Quaternary interglacials. We welcome contributions on new field or remote sensing data, synthesis and databases specifically related to sea-level changes (including geochronological methods). We also welcome contributions exploring other coastal processes at the same timescale, focussing on wave conditions, extreme coastal events, and coastal modelling.
This session falls under the purview of PALSEA-Next, a working group of the International Union for Quaternary Sciences (INQUA) and Past Global Changes (PAGES) and from the WARMCOASTS project, funded by the European Research Council under the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement n. 802414).