Environmental Futures Seminar: Professor Nicole Khan

Geological proxies provide critical insights into sea-level responses to past climate variability during periods of more extreme global temperatures than the instrumental record. Characterizing past sea-level changes and projecting future rise shares two key challenges: (1) substantial regional and local deviations from the global mean driven by factors like tectonics and subsidence, and (2) uncertainties persist in both records of past changes and the physical and statistical modeling approaches used to project future changes, requiring careful quantification and statistical analysis. Focusing on the Holocene and the most recent interglacial period, this talk explores the processes driving spatial variability, efforts to standardize global databases, and key data gaps, highlighting how these insights enhance our understanding of the relationship between sea level and climate and inform future relative sea-level changes.

Nicole Khan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. She received her B.A. in Earth Science and Mathematics from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied past changes in sea level. She is on the leadership team of HOLSEA (Geographic variability of HOLocene SEA level) and the Marine and Coastal Science Division of the Geological Society of America, and on the steering committee of PALSEA (PALeo-constraints on SEA-level rise). She is also a contributing author to the IPCC AR6 report.