The smoking guns of climate change
- Wits University
Professor Jasper Knight from the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences, delivers his inaugural lecture.
“Sandy coasts are the smoking guns of climate change. They will tell us something about climate change which no other physical environments are able to do so.”
This is according to Professor Jasper Knight from the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences at Wits University. He delivered his inaugural lecture, titled: Climate Change and Sandy Coastlines on Tuesday, 17 June 2014.
Focusing on one specific aspect of his research and by looking at both now and in the past, Knight showed how sandy coasts are ideal physical environments to tell us about the impact of climate change.
Discussing case studies from four continents he illustrated why sandy coastlines are sensitive to sea level, storms and windiness, and the signatures that they leave behind. Especially “wave and wind regimes have changed and are changing under global warming”, he said.
“If we have climate change causing changes to atmospheric circulation, changes to ocean circulation, changes to wave climate regime – the place where all of those things are going to be recorded is on sandy coasts. So those are the things that we should be monitoring, because those are going to tell us more about the impact of climate change upon the physical environments than anything else. So this is why sandy coastlines are particularly important and why I’m interested in them with respect to evaluating the impacts of global warming upon physical environments,” Knight said.
Listen to his inaugural lecture:
Short biography:
Professor Knight is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography in the Wits School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies. As a geoscientist, his research interests are on landscape responses to climate change during the last 15 000 years. He focusses on glaciers, coasts and mountains and their responses to climate change. Geographically, his focus is on the UK and Ireland, northwest USA, Australia, the European Alps, New Zealand, Spain and southern Africa.