Seb Pitman

This work kindly supported by the @ncl-geography.bsky.social Impact Fund, meaning we can work with partners to provide more information on coastal flooding and overtopping.

🌊 Storm Babet impacted large parts of the North East. Using high-resolution wave modelling, we can now simulate wave heights and energy across the full event and apply the same approach to past and future storms to better understand coastal impacts. #WaveModelling #StormBabet #CoastalScience

#CoastSnapColdingham

Our first results from analysing your #CoastSnapNewbiggin submissions. It’s been a pretty energetic winter in the North East, and so overall we’ve seen retreat (with lots of variability - albeit corrected for tide). Keep the submissions coming! @ncl-geography.bsky.social @hassfacultyncl.bsky.social

Keep your eye out at the coast for our #CoastSnap locations - tracking coastal change through #CitizenScience. A day surveying in the Scottish Borders and Northumberland today so we can turn your fantastic submissions so far into quantitative outputs of shoreline change @ncl-geography.bsky.social

I didn’t leave entirely empty handed….!

Spent yesterday hosted by Hartlepool Golf Club discussing the loss of their signature links holes as a result of a beck at the top of the beach cutting back the dunes. Interesting and exciting to explore collaboration, as well as research and monitoring opportunities @ncl-geography.bsky.social

@ncl-geography.bsky.social

Figure from the paper showing the eroding faces of coastal legacy landfill locations

Our new study in Water looks at how “forever chemicals” (those that do not break down for centuries) are being released through coastal erosion of old landfills. We studied one such site to show how climate driven shoreline change releases long buried contaminants www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/18...

A beautiful crisp day at the beach today doing a laser scanner install, and a camera install for PhD Student Ellie @geospatialcdt.bsky.social with @rockavalanches.bsky.social @ncl-geography.bsky.social

Catching the tail end of #StormGoretti up here along the colliery coast. Blowing out the cobwebs this morning with my crazy spaniels after a blissful few weeks on paternity leave!

Excellent time learning to model compound flood events at @deltares.bsky.social today. Hugely grateful for @ncl-geography.bsky.social Impact Funding, meaning we can now incorporate this work into the Durham Heritage Coast plans over the coming years!

One of our Geography corridors in the Henry Daysh Building at Newcastle University

Hello! We're the new Bluesky account for Geography at Newcastle University (UK).

We'll be sharing new, updates, reflections, projects and more from Geography staff, postgraduates, and students.

Feels good to be back at Blast Beach! Full site survey ahead of winter storm season @hassfacultyncl.bsky.social

Hi everyone, I recently had the opportunity to visit the island of Texel… | Alex Biddulph Hi everyone, I recently had the opportunity to visit the island of Texel in the Netherlands with Geography at Newcastle University for the field research project based on De Slufter— a dynamic salt m...

Last week we took 31 students to the Netherlands to look at physical geography, coastal processes, and climate change and adaption in action. Great to hear these student reflections that underscore how important field experience is to our discipline! @hassfacultyncl.bsky.social

And finally, a trip to climb St Mary’s lighthouse to draw the conference to a close. Thanks to all the delegates for an excellent few days.

Now off to the ferry terminal to start our Netherlands Physical Geography field course for a week!

Thanks to everyone attending the YCSE Conference at @newcastleuni.bsky.social! Yesterday was an excellent day of talks ranging from gravel, to kelp, to tsunamis, and today we head to St Mary’s Lighthouse for a conservation talk and lighthouse climb!

A beautiful morning setting up for today’s Young Coastal Scientists’ & Engineers’ Conference here at @newcastleuni.bsky.social Dove Marine Lab! We’re delighted to welcome 30 early career researchers and practitioners to our little corner of paradise!! @hassfacultyncl.bsky.social @sagencl.bsky.social

Photo of the eastern margin of Skeiðarárjökull taken in April 2022 showing the 2021 Grímsvötn jökulhlaup outlets (Photo: Andy Russell)

Photo of the eastern margin of Skeiðarárjökull taken in April 2022 showing the 2021 Grímsvötn jökulhlaup outlets (Photo: Andy Russell)

Photo of the eastern margin of Skeiðarárjökull taken in April 2022 showing the 2021 Grímsvötn jökulhlaup outlets (Photo: Andy Russell)

Photo of the eastern margin of Skeiðarárjökull taken in April 2022 showing the 2021 Grímsvötn jökulhlaup outlets (Photo: Andy Russell)

#Jökulhlaup en route through #Skeiðarárjökull from #Grímsvötn subglacial lake.
en.vedur.is/about-imo/ne...
Some photos of the 2021 Grímsvötn jökulhlaup outlets on the eastern margin of Skeiðarárjökull taken in April 2022.

Delighted to give this new research a bit of an airing today on the #QRA2025 field trip to Blast Beach - thanks for the invite to talk @iceybethan.bsky.social

Professor Bob Kirk was a pioneer in mixed sediment beach research and many of his findings, thoughts, theories and ideas still drive the direction of research today. Delighted to contribute in a small way to this memorial piece in NZ Coastal News: www.coastalsociety.org.nz/assets/Uploa...

We have extended abstract submission for the UK Young Coastal Scientist & Engineers’ Conference until the end of the month! We’re excited to hear about your research - take a look at conference details here: conferences.ncl.ac.uk/ycsec2025/

Please pass on to any early career coastal colleagues!

Abstract submission closes on 20th December for the UK Young Coastal Scientist and Engineers Conference, being held in Newcastle 3-4th April 2025, full details here: conferences.ncl.ac.uk/ycsec2025/

Another day, another science Starter Pack!

Here's a list of amazing #coastal scientists and engineers working in coastal hazards 🌩️, erosion 🌊, geomorphology 🏖️, imaging 📸, remote sensing 🛰️, ecology 🪸 and more!

Would love to add more - please tag anyone who is missing! 🙏

go.bsky.app/6GpjiDf

It was an interesting piece, and fun to try and work out some numbers on the things we thought we knew but couldn’t be certain about - take a look!

Normally disconnected beaches round prominent headlands were still filled with spoil from updrift collieries, and the timing of changes along the coast was not uniform showing the lag effect as sediment moved south. Now we see massive erosion of the spoil platform as the beaches return to “normal”

We knew from historic maps this de facto mega nourishment (acknowledging the prolonged timescale) caused massive progradation, and anecdotally we heard about rapid retreat when tipping ceased. We used CoastSat to look at this in more detail and saw some initial retreat rates reached *12 m per year*

No one has ever really quantified the amount of sediment that had been dumped so we did some digging and estimate at least *39 million cubic metres* in the 20th Century (after converting from weight to volume using some of our own measurements of spoil density)

Our new paper looks at the long term changes we’ve seen on the Durham coast. The polluted beaches were made famous by the Michael Caine film, which ironically gives us some of the best contemporaneous imagery of what the sites used to be like … www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...