Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGISTS ASSOCIATION
Volume 125, Issue 1, Pages 1-13Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2013.07.003
Keywords
PSI; Land level change; Holocene; Tectonic control; London
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Funding
- Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
- Environment Agency (EA) in the UK
- Natural Environment Research Council [bgs05001, BIGF010001] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [BIGF010001, bgs05001] Funding Source: UKRI
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Long term planning for flood risk management in coastal areas requires timely and reliable information on changes in land and sea levels. A high resolution map of current changes in land levels in the London and Thames estuary area has been generated by satellite-based persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI), aligned to absolute gravity (AG) and global positioning system (GPS) measurements. This map has been qualitatively validated by geological interpretation, which demonstrates a variety of controlling influences on the rates of land level change, ranging from near-surface to deep-seated mechanisms and from less than a decade to more than 100,000 years' duration. During the period 1997-2005, most of the region around the Thames estuary subsided between 0.9 and 1.5 mm a(-1) on average, with subsidence of thick Holocene deposits being as fast as 2.1 mm a(-1). By contrast, parts of west and north London on the Midlands Microcraton subsided by less than 0.7 mm a(-1) and in places appear to have risen by about 0.3 mm a(-1). These rates of subsidence are close to values determined previously by studies of Quaternary sequences, but the combined GUS, AG and PSI land level change data demonstrate a new level of local geological control that was not previously resolvable. (C) 2013 Natural Environment Research Council. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Geologists' Association. All rights reserved.
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