The 2020 PalSea Meeting was originally going to cover the topic “Improving understanding of ice-sheet and solid-Earth processes driving sea-level change” with support from SERCE. Due to COVID-19, the in-person meeting was not held Sept. 15-16th at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the state of New York, USA as originally planned. However, although the organizers decided to postpone the in-person meeting until a date TBD in mid-to-late 2021, a virtual meeting entitled “PalSea Express” was held Sept. 15-16th, 2020. It was well attended with 201 scientists registered for the meeting, not including the 31 presenters and 5 organizers, and more than 120 people listening to any one of the invited speakers. Eighty of the participants, 5 of the invited speakers, and 22 of the poster presenters identified as early career. Thirty four different countries were represented including nine scientists from low GDP countries.
During the two 3-hour sessions, 8 speakers and 23 poster presenters covered a variety of topics, many of which were relevant to SERCE interests. From the abstracts submitted, two major themes arose for the meeting. During the first day the presentations focused on relative sea-level changes and glacial-isostatic modeling for the time period since the last glacial maximum, while the second day's presentations largely focused on the Last Interglacial period. The speakers touched on several SERCE relevant topics including the role of previous ice sheet configurations on estimates of sea-level change at the LGM and other time periods during the Quaternary, the fate of West Antarctica during the last interglacial, ~120,000 years ago, and the potential contribution of Antarctica to sea-level changes throughout the last couple glacial cycles. Another speaker spoke about the interhemispheric connections between the behaviors of the ice sheets across the northern and southern polar regions.
Alex Simms, Jacky Austermann, Alessio Rovere, Jeremy Shakun, and Natasha Barlow
