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Tools for Constructing Chronologies pp 189–211Cite as

Constructing Chronologies of Sea-Level Change from Salt-Marsh Sediments

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Statistics ((LNS,volume 177))

Summary

This chapter reviews recent research into the chronology of sea-level change. Since sea-level is related to global temperatures, an understanding of sea-level change has become particularly important over recent years and is offering insights into a range of issues including ice sheet distribution, past environmental change and coastal management. In all these areas, an understanding of the timing as well as the nature of sea-level change is important and so chronometric methods as well as stratigraphic ones are typically employed. This chapter reviews the nature of the data that provide information about sea-level change and highlights some of the challenges facing those who wish to establish chronologies. The challenges have parallels with those in archaeological research, but as yet there has not been much cross-fertilization of methods between the two disciplines. This chapter offers some suggestions for the most pressing problems that still need formal tools and provides a case study using wiggle-matching that illustrates the kinds of improvements that researchers of sea-level change might expect if such methods were adopted more widely.

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Authors
  1. Robin J. Edwards
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Probability and Statistics, University of Sheffield, Hicks Building Hounsfield Road, S3 7RH, Sheffield, UK

    Caitlin E. Buck

  2. Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, South Road, DH1 3LE, Durham, UK

    Andrew R. Millard

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Edwards, R.J. (2004). Constructing Chronologies of Sea-Level Change from Salt-Marsh Sediments. In: Buck, C.E., Millard, A.R. (eds) Tools for Constructing Chronologies. Lecture Notes in Statistics, vol 177. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0231-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0231-1_9

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-85233-763-6

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