Dr Aimée Slangen - Sea-Level Scientist

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!
Aimee Slangen: "The biggest effect of melting ice masses on local sea level is farthest away from them." #era2017pic.twitter.com/mxLKyweyUF — ECRA (@ECRA_Climate) March 8, 2017

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!
At the NCK days in Den Helder. First @NIOZnieuws contribution of the day by Roeland vd Vijsel on algea & feedbacks on formation of mudflats pic.twitter.com/eM6wjJDwhU — Aimée Slangen (@AimeeSlangen) March 16, 2017
Also, I was interviewed by Marlies ter Voorde of NEMO Kennislink, for…

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…

As a result of my move to the UK, it is much easier to visit labs in the UK that do great work on sea-level change. In fact, traveling within Europe is now a breeze compared to the long-haul flights from Australia, definitely a benefit of being back on the old continent again!

In May I was kindly invited to give a seminar at the National Oceanographic Institute in Liverpool. It was a great visit, and Svetlana and Phil gave me the grand tour of the institute and of Liverpool after my seminar.

Next up: a week-long visit to the Met Office in Exeter and the University of Exeter in June. I gave another seminar and had many fruitful discussions with the sea-level group of Matt and other sea-level minded people at the Met Office. And of course we cheered on England in their EURO2016 match against Wales on our excursion along the Exe estuary.


The next week I was back on the road again, to deliver a keynote at the ECRA sea-level meeting in Bergen (Norway), followed by a couple of days in the …

A while ago, my Twitter feed showed the following message:



I thought this sounded really interesting! I had a browse at the website of Planet Press to find out more about the project. The EGU (European Geosciences Union) publishes a number of scientific journals. Sometimes, a new article in one of those journal is accompanied by a press release. These press releases are aimed at people with a bit of background in science, but may be too complicated for others. This is where Planet Press comes in: the press releases are rewritten such that everybody can understand them! The press releases from Planet Press are aimed at 7-13 year old kids, and their parents and educators. Since not all kids speak English, the press releases are translated into different languages. While browsing on the website I noticed that almost none of the press releases had been translated into Dutch. I decided to sign up! So... (*drumroll*) here is my first translation! Have fun! All my translations can be found un…