Dr Aimée Slangen - Sea-Level Scientist

Summer is here! Which means, conferencing time is here too! 

The conference of the year for me as a sea-level researcher was the WCRP/IOC conference Regional sea level changes and coastal impacts that took place on 10-14 July in New York. Everybody was going to be there. Everybody! No pressure...

About 400 coastal and sea-level scientists flocked together at the impressive Columbia University Campus for a week of presentations, posters, meetings on sea-level change. All presentations were plenary in the large Roone Arledge auditorium, so all presenters were sure to have large and diverse audience. 

The week started with past sea-level changes, and worked gradually towards future projections by the end of the week. This meant that my hard work would be at the end of the week - or so I thought. With all these people there, it turns out I was super busy all week! Catching up with colleagues and friends that I have collected over the course of my scientific career. Lots of ideas were spilt -…

This week I received a nice surprise by mail: a book that came out of an ISSI workshop in Bern in February 2015 on sea-level change. The book is a collection of papers that appeared in a special issue in Surveys in Geophysics earlier this year. It presents reviews on lots of different aspects of sea-level change and is well worth a read! 


A paper that came out of my postdoc position at IMAU last year has now been published in a special issue of the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering. The paper shows how sea-level allowances change for different types of uncertainty distributions in the sea-level projections. 

A co-authored paper with Thomas Wahl has just been accepted for publication in Nature Communications, also on extreme sea levels! 

Last week I attended a workshop of the Dutch Network for Women Professors (LNVH) in Utrecht, on how to become more visible in the media as a (female) scientist. There was an interesting panel discussion, followed by workshops with tips & tri…

My colleague described it as "feeling like an ant in an ants' nest", and she is right - the EGU General Assembly in Vienna is a BIG conference! 14,000+ participants, talking geoscience all week.. How amazing is that??!!

That means a BIG conference venue. Even as this was my third EGU (in 10 years, mind you) the triangular conference centre still confused me every now and then. But hey, a few extra steps in between all the sitting never hurt anybody ;) Still, you'll quickly find that certain topics stick to certain floors: I mostly wandered round on yellow or brown, with the occasional trip to the green floor. Therefore, it is still quite possible to run into people that you know!

It also means a LOT of talks and posters! Talks are scheduled in 4 blocks of 6 talks (of 15 minutes), and then the poster sessions run from 17.30 to 19.00 in the evening. It is so good, especially for a sea level scientist like me, to have the choice of lots of topics that all feed into my lin…

The first conference this month was only a 2hr trainride away in Brussels, the ECRA 2017 General Assembly. I was invited to talk as a representative of the Collaborative Program on Sea-Level Rise within ECRA, and provided the audience with an introduction to making regional sea-level projections. Got lots of good feedback and good questions!


Second, the NCK Days in the Den Helder, all the way in the North of the Netherlands. I presented a posted on sea-level allowances and learnt a lot about (bio)geomorphology at the coast!

Also, I was interviewed by Marlies ter Voorde of NEMO Kennislink, for an article on sea-level change measurements, projections, and the human influence: (in Dutch: https://www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/hoe-meet-je-de-zeespiegelstijging)

In the first week of the new year I volunteered for Hull's City of Culture 2017 opening event: In with a bang! A display of Hull and it's people across the city centre, which attracted 300,000 people in a week time. 



After this great week I left Hull (though probably not for the last time), and took the ferry to the Netherlands to start my new job at NIOZ. The first few weeks have been good and I received a very warm welcome at my new institute. 

On Thursday 26 February I had an interview with Radio 1 Belgium about the effect of melting ice on regional patterns in sea-level change. 

My first co-authored paper of 2017 has been accepted for Earth's Future: "A new approach to projecting 21st century sea-level changes and extremes", with Phil Goodwin, Eelco Rohling and Ivan Haigh.

The coming months are promising to be busy but with lots of exciting events: I'll be speaking at the ECRA general assembly in Brussels, visit the NCK days in Den Helder and prepare to go t…

My time in the UK and my postdoc at IMAU are coming to an end, as I prepare to move to NIOZ in Yerseke in the new year. Here's an update of what I've been up to these last couple of months... in tweets!

Seminar in York

Had great day in York, explaining to students & staff about all the different contributions to sea-level change and presenting my Detection & Attribution work.
Packed house for fantastic seminar by the brilliant @AimeeSlangen on Detection and Attribution of 20th C Sea-Level Rise @YorkEnvironmentpic.twitter.com/yGvD6dZn0w — Roland Gehrels (@RolandGehrels) October 11, 2016
Paper accepted for Surveys in Geophysics special issue 

S. Jevrejeva, A. Matthews and A. Slangen (2016) The twentieth century sea-level budget: recent progress and challenges, Surveys in Geophysics, doi: 10.1007/s10712-016-9405-z. (Free read-only version at http://rdcu.be/nEr4)
Another paper from the productive ISSI workshop is available now, this one on the 20th century sea-level budget! h…

September has been a busy & productive month, so here's a quick update. 

New job

I am proud to announce that I will be starting a tenure-track position at NIOZ in the Netherlands in the beginning of 2017. I will be working at the department of Estuarine and Delta Systems in Yerseke. My research focus will still be on sea-level change, but with an aim to translate sea-level change into coastal changes - a research question that I hope to tackle by combining the expertise of my new colleagues at NIOZ with my own.


New publication

Together with Jan Lenaerts, my colleague at IMAU, I have published a paper in Environmental Research Letters. The paper looks at the response of global and regional sea-level change to ice sheet freshwater forcing, and compares (1) the direct oceanographic response to the freshwater flow into the ocean to (2) the gravitational effect due to the redistribution of mass between ice sheet and ocean. We find that both processes are important to include in sea-le…