Of Moon and Land, Ice and Strand : Sea Level During Glacial Cycles

Of Moon and Land, Ice and Strand encompasses the four elements constituting theprincipal directions of Lambeck s research over the past five decades: the Moon andartificial satellites; the Earth s surface, crust and deep interior; the ice sheets of thegeologically recent past; and aspects of the oceans and the coastal zones. In thislecture, Lambeck shows us what can be learnt from the analysis of past sea-leveldata, for example complementing glaciological and geological models of past events,or gaining insight into the material behaviour of the Earth (the mantle responsefunction). Most importantly, observations of the ice histories and mantle responsefunctions can be unscrambled to provide models with predictive capabilities,and this has implications for other fields of science like archaeology, pre-historypaleogeography and the study of modern sea-level change.