Why drilling in the North Sea won’t bring down UK energy prices Trump, Farage, the Tories and the right-wing press are all calling for it, but here's why experts say extracting oil and gas from the North Sea can't bring down UK energy prices

Our colleague Gavin Bridge is quoted a number of times in this piece just published in The Independent about extracting oil and gas from the North Sea: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Durham Geography has reached its highest-ever position in the QS World University Rankings 2026—rising to 6th globally (from 11th in 2025). Thank you to our staff, students, alumni, and partners worldwide who have helped make this possible.

Mangrove sediments reveal drivers of Late Holocene sea-level change in the equatorial Pacific Ocean Proxy relative sea level (RSL) reconstructions offer context for historical observations and future projections. Unlike many sites in the equatorial P…

Our new paper in QSR led by @seftongeo.bsky.social, presents new relative sea level records from the Federated States of Micronesia. Utilising subsiding islands and spatio-temporal modelling lets us derive information from important new locations in the Pacific:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looking for postdoc positions in the UK studying weather extremes?

Two jobs with deadline 4th Jan:

Historical windstorms, working with two insurance companies: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Storylines of extreme events, as part of a European collaboration: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

An Alaskan coastal environment with vegetated beach ridges and a calm sea

22-month postdoctoral position in the Durham Geography department working on Alaska paleogeodesy as part of NERC/NSF funded grant. More details here, application deadline is January 8th: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

An Alaskan coastal environment with vegetated beach ridges and a calm sea

22-month postdoctoral position in the Durham Geography department working on Alaska paleogeodesy as part of NERC/NSF funded grant. More details here, application deadline is January 8th: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

Job opportunity - Postdoctoral Research Associate working alongside @sealevelchange.bsky.social - Job Description - Postdoctoral Research Associate in Physical Geography (25001689) closing date 11:59pm 8th January 2025

Our colleague Chris Stokes is currently at COP30 sharing some of the science around ice sheets and sea level rise, including a recent paper from earlier this year: www.nature.com/articles/s43... Here he is with an update and a few words on what he's been up to....

A great few days of outreach activity at the Celebrate Science event at Locomotion in Shildon, County Durham. Pictured here are Lauren Pretorius and @sealevelchange.bsky.social who kindly staffed our augmented reality sand box.

Congratulations to Olivia Griffin Roach who has been announced as the joint winner of the 2025 Social & Cultural Geography Research Group dissertation prize for her project 'Beyond the Bump: Understanding How Women Experience and Navigate Pregnancy & Early Motherhood in the Financial Service Sector'

The Geographical Magazine of the RGS-IBG has just published a supplement on choosing University Geography courses. Two of the five 'case study' students are from Durham - Mia Yearwood and Cameron Powell. They provide some valuable insights on what its like to study on our BA and BSc programmes.

We are delighted to announce the 2025 History and Philosophy of Geography undergraduate dissertation prize winner: Henry Blake, @geogdurham.bsky.social, for his dissertation Foreclosed Futures: Hope, Precarity, and Ambivalence in Contemporary Cornwall. Read it here: tinyurl.com/4jjc4dp6

#geosky

A preprint describing our concerns with Voortman and De Vos posted here:

We are writing to raise serious concerns regarding Voortman, H. G., & De Vos, R. (2025). A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering. Voortman & de Vos (2025) attempt to test for acceleration in relative sea-level (RSL) records from 243 tide gauges. They claim to have identified statistically significant acceleration in only 12 of the 243 gauges and conclude that “This pattern is inconsistent with sea level acceleration driven by global phenomena.” This result, which stands in contrast both to other studies conducting similar tide-gauge analyses (e.g., Wang et al., 2021, 2025) and the broader body of knowledge regarding global-mean sea level change and its drivers (e.g., Fox-Kemper et al., 2021), demands scrutiny. Yet the reviewers failed to recognise the context of this manuscript and the breadth of the existing literature, resulting in at best a superficial review. Upon close examination, we believe the paper contains fatal methodological flaws that compromise the validity of its conclusions and merit retraction. Scientific Context Comparison to other studies of RSL acceleration at tide-gauges and IPCC projections: The conclusions of this study are dramatically different from those of Wang et al. (2021, 2025). Wang et al. (2025) concluded significant acceleration was present at 68% of tide gauges, while this paper identifies it at only 4%. It is surprising that the reviewers did not insist that the authors provide a discussion to explain how they came to such different results, rather than ignoring the substance of Wang et al. (2021) and the existence of Wang et al. (2025). (We describe some likely statistical reasons below.) Notably, the authors state that “a comparison [of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections] to locally observed sea level appears to date to have been undertaken on a very limited scale”, and have made similar claims to the media, even though they cite without

discussion Wang et al. (2021), which focuses precisely on a global-scale comparison of local observations and IPCC projections from 2013 and 2019 reports. They do not cite Wang et al. (2025), which extends this analysis using the same 2021 IPCC projections that are employed in this paper. Voortman and de Vos (2025) find that the 2021 IPCC median projected rates of relative sea level rise over 2010-2030 are higher than their preferred estimates of 2020 tide-gauge long-term rates by an average of about 2 mm/yr. Because the authors’ statistical tests reject the presence of acceleration at the large majority of tide gauges, they are effectively comparing IPCC projected rates — which account for the factors driving global-mean sea-level acceleration — with average rates over the length of the tide gauge record. By contrast, Wang et al. (2025) find that tide-gauge trends and accelerations extrapolated to 2050 agree with IPCC likely range projections at 96% of locations. Similarly, the Voortman and de Vos (2025) results are also in disagreement with regional studies where model-observation comparisons have been undertaken. For instance, Dangendorf et al (2023) report tide-gauge based rates of sterodynamic sea-level rise that are in 2020 at least twice as large as those from climate models along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts, while Voortman and de Vos (2025) report IPCC rates that exceed tide gauge observations at the same locations (their Figure 9). The only exception in their model is Pensacola, which appears as an outlier in their assessment. Given the coherence of observed changes along this coast (Dangendorf et al., 2023), this also raises questions why their statistical model yields so different results for neighboring sites. Voortman and de Vos (2025) do not discuss any of these discrepancies. Comparison to other constraints on sea-level acceleration driven by global phenomena: In as much as the authors’ goal is to test for “sea le

The authors also engage minimally with research on the global-mean sea level budget since 1900 (c.f. Fox-Kemper et al., 2021), providing a brief dismissal of one paper: “The current state of affairs is best illustrated by the paper by Frederikse et al. [(2020)] that claims to have “closed the sea level budget”. Unfortunately, a detailed inspection revealed a number of weaknesses and even errors in Frederikse’s work.” This statement is backed only by a reference to the first author’s own work (Voortman, 2023), which does not substantively engage with Frederikse et al. (2020). Regarding Frederikse et al. (2020), Voortman (2023) simply writes about his feelings: “Albeit Frederikse’s paper is an impressive scientific achievement, I feel that this conclusion is too rash. Estimating that the number of unknowns in this problem is larger than the number of equations available, I tentatively suggest that the reconstruction by Frederikse et al. is one of many plausible reconstructions that close the sea level budget.” No more “detailed inspection” of Frederikse et al. (2020) is provided in this paper or the cited source. The authors also highlight Munk (2002)’s enigma, which was an apparent inconsistency between estimates of 20th century global-mean sea-level rise compared with constraints on changes in Earth rotation and the sea level budget, but miss subsequent work resolving it. This inconsistency was subsequently resolved by newer estimates of 20th century global-mean sea level rise, improved modeling of glacial isostatic adjustment and its effect on Earth rotation, and improved interpretation of the constraints on Earth rotation from eclipse records (e.g., Dangendorf et al., 2017; Frederikse et al., 2020; Hay et al., 2015, 2016; Mitrovica et al., 2015).

While the paper’s inadequate engagement with current scientific literature raises serious concerns, its statistical errors and biases render it internally invalid. Since these errors and biases fundamentally shape the paper, they cannot be corrected without complete rewriting and therefore necessitate the paper’s retraction. An examination of the reviewer comments reveal there has been no serious statistical evaluation of the methods or their appropriateness, or of the results. 1. Issues with model specification The paper hinges on the comparison of two models: one linear in time (no acceleration), and one with a changepoint after which quadratic and cubic terms (and thus acceleration) are present. The authors’ model with acceleration has 3 more fitted parameters than their no-acceleration model (a quadratic coefficient, a cubic coefficient, and a change point). We are not aware of any previous assessment of the third derivative of sea level (the cubic term), and a minimally larger model with acceleration requires only one fitted parameter (a quadratic coefficient; the change point could be fixed at, say, 1970 for consistency with other literature). Because hypothesis testing metrics penalize the loss of degrees of freedom, using three additional parameters raises the threshold of detection for acceleration more than is necessary and increases the risk of false negatives. It is also well known that interannual/decadal variability is one of the largest signals that makes detecting an acceleration in single time series challenging. However, there is no attempt to limit the impact of this variability on the detection of any acceleration (contrast Wang et al., 2021, 2025), and this critical issue is not even discussed. 2. Issues with model estimation 3. Invalid use of the F-test for hypothesis testing

So I & 14 colleagues (incl. @richardtol.bsky.social @vsrikrish.bsky.social @goneri76.bsky.social) wrote an expression of concern, laying out the problems with the paper and calling for its retraction. We first provide scientific context, and the paper's failure to engage with related studies. 2/

I had an engagement with blogger, failed California gubernatorial candidate, and self-identified reporter Michael Shellenberger this past week, which started out being about this new paper being heralded by climate skeptics as disproving global sea-level acceleration. (LONG 🧵)

Double record breaker: Spring 2025 is warmest and sunniest on UK record Spring 2025 has broken historical climate records, marking an unprecedented season of warmth and sunshine across the UK, according to provisional Met Office statistics.

The UK just had its warmest spring on record.

It was also the sunniest on record.

And the driest in more than 50 years.

"A sign of our changing climate", says @metoffice.bsky.social

www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/new...

Associate Professor (Research & Education) at Durham University Apply for the Associate Professor (Research & Education) role on jobs.ac.uk, the top job board for academic positions in higher education. View details and apply now.

Durham Geography @geogdurham.bsky.social is looking to appoint an Associate Professor in the field of Heritage Landscapes and/or Social Justice and Wellbeing in heritage. Happy to answer questions. Please share widely #geography #heritage #universityjobs www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNH544/a...

Is it hot right now in the UK?

New interactive website allowing anyone to explore live temperatures hour-by-hour across the UK, and whether they are cool, warm or hot relative to normal.

istheukhotrightnow.com

Built by @roostweather.bsky.social.

Chris's work has also featured in The Guardian: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

There’s so much happening right now, I thought I’d put together a running thread on the dismantling of #climate and research and knowledge infrastructure in the United States 🧵

A 700-year rupture sequence of great eastern Aleutian earthquakes from tsunami evidence and modeling New research from the USGS, University of Hawaiʻi, and the University of California, Santa Cruz provides fresh insights into a prehistoric sequence of earthquakes in the Aleutian Islands. Researchers ...

USGS research has uncovered a 700-year sequence of major earthquakes in the eastern Aleutian Islands through tsunami evidence and modeling. This work enhances our understanding of seismic hazards in the region.
🌋⚒️🧪
#Seismology
#TsunamiResearch
#AleutianIslands #EarthquakePreparedness

In This Issue | PNAS In This Issue

Our Cascadia earthquake-driven subsidence and sea-level rise paper is featured in a PNAS "In This Issue" highlight. doi.org/10.1073/iti1.... There's a pug and cat on the cover of the issue so that's also cool 😺 And check out the paper here! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cascadia subduction zone study sites

A core showing evidence of ~1 m of earthquake-driven subsidence from the 1700 CE Cascadia earthquake.

🚨New Study Alert!🚨
Our new PNAS study shows how earthquake-driven land subsidence + rising seas = major flood hazards along the Cascadia subduction zone. 🌊🌎 @cascadiaeqs.bsky.social (1/🧵)
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

3-year postdoc here in Geography at Durham working on sand extraction with Dr. Laura Schoenberger: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

Map showing the location of the March 27, 1964 M9.2 Alaska earthquake.

March 27, 1964 - a M9.2 subduction #earthquake struck southern #Alaska. Shaking was felt across much of #BritishColumbia and Yukon and the resulting #tsunami caused damage in some coastal BC communities.
More (USGS): earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...
Video: youtube.com/watch?v=L6TB...
⚒️🧪🌊

Our colleague Jonathan Darling gave evidence at the Home Affairs Committee on how the current model of asylum accommodation is failing, offering poor value for money to the taxpayer, inadequate shelter to those in need, and a lack of considered and sustained engagement with communities.

Congratulations to our recent graduate George Buckland whose dissertation was awarded first place by the Urban Geography Research Group. George's dissertation was entitled 'The gaybourhood never sleeps: Mapping the intergenerational (re)configurations of queer urban space (Manchester’s Gay Village).

Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology Visit the post for more.

Are you a PhD or Masters student in Paleoclimate looking to learn and network with your community? Excited to announce that applications to USSP 2025 are now open until 6th March. 🦖⚛️🪨🌊🔬🧑🏽‍💻
Please share! 🤩

Harrier League XC at Wrekenton

Today’s #MisconceptionMonday is a little bit outside of my normal discourse, but I’m gonna go with it. Today is the anniversary of the idea of Continental Drift, so we’re going to discuss some misunderstandings around how science progresses. 1/n (long, as usual)