Project meeting

You'd think the scientific community knows exactly what sea level has done over the past several hundred years. It doesn't. That's what we're trying to find out, at least for the North Atlantic realm. Who's we? Antony and Tasha in Durham; Phil, Miguel and Vassil in Liverpool; and Roland and me in Plymouth. And why so many? I've elaborated on it before, but it boils down to that our salt marsh formas are sensitive to how often they are above the water, which makes them good sea level indicators. The Durham crew does similar things on other microfossils, and combining the two methods improves the robustness and accuracy of the method. The Liverpudlians do the modelling; they juggle around with isostasy, atmospheric pressure, gravitational pull, and whatnot, in order to clean up our records. And now we got together.

We now showed each other what we had done so far, and what our plans were, and I can hardly wait to get back to my microscope and carry on. Such meetings matter! If you see it all together it makes so much more sense. The diatoms do indeed improve what we can do with only forams. The modellers can do amazing tricks that will help us find the interesting parts of the record. There is still so much to do, but let's do it, and it will be great! Stay tuned!