A cross-faculty, interdisciplinary project that aims to increase our understanding of Fife’s coast featured in BBC Scotland’s farming and countryside programme Landward this week.
Fife Coastal Zone, funded by a University Restarting Research award, looks at past and present coastal environments and sea levels and the impact these have on society. Schools and departments contributing to the project include Biology, Computer Science, Divinity, Earth & Environmental Sciences, History, Geography & Sustainable Development, the Wardlaw Museum and the Music Centre.
The BBC production team filmed the project’s sampling of the area to the east of St Andrews, where the raised beaches represent time periods following the last glacial maximum when the sea level was much higher than it is today. The programme features, from EES, Sarah Boyd (PhD student) and Tim Kinnaird (Research Officer) undertaking dating on the platforms visible in the area, alongside some geophysics by Dr Richard Bates, as they try to understand where the sea levels were and what the environments were like over the past 20,000 years.