New RISeR publication: Last Interglacial sea level database

As part RISeR and the World Atlas of Last Interglacial Shorelines (WALIS) community database efforts (a programme of work supported by PALSEA and WARMCOASTS), project partner Kim Cohen (U. Utrecht) led the compilation of new database of Last Interglacial sea-level data points.

The paper summarises a database of 146 known Last Interglacial sea-level data points from in and around the North Sea (35 entries in the Netherlands, 10 Belgium, 23 in Germany, 17 in Denmark, 9 in Britain) and the English Channel (24 entries for the British and 25 for the French side, 3 on the Channel Isles) believed to be a representative and fairly complete inventory and assessment from ∼80 published sites.  We also incorporated an updated quantification of background rates of basin subsidence for the central and eastern North Sea region, utilising revised mapping of the base Quaternary, to correct for significant basin subsidence in this depocentre.

This compilation of data is an important contribution to global databasing efforts, which are critical for ice sheet and solid Earth modelling, as well as forming part of the dataset required for regional analyses within the RISeR project.  RISeR PhD student, Oliver Pollard, will be making use of this dataset as part of his research into the glacial isostatic adjustment that occurred within the North Sea region during the Last Interglacial.

The publication detailing the database can be found here: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/2895/2022, forming part of the WALIS special issue, and the supporting dataset can be freely downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6478094