Andrew Kemp

Andy graduated from the University of Durham (UK) with a BSc in Physical Geography in 2002.  Between 2004 and 2010 he was a graduate student and then a post doctoral associate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  Andy’s thesis focused on reconstructing sea-level changes in coastal North Carolina over the last 2000 years, although he was also involved in research aiming to produce longer sea-level records and other projects that sought to reconstruct the frequency of hurricane landfalls and earthquakes using coastal sediments.  As a postdoctoral fellow with the YCEI, Andy worked with  Shimon Anisfeld in the School of Forestry to understand the response of salt marshes to sea-level rise in the past.

Andy’s research aims to produce high resolution reconstructions of sea-level change over the last 2000 years.  These records document the response (timing and magnitude) of sea level at local, regional and global scales to known climate deviations including the Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age and recent (20th century) warming. Reconstructions of sea level are developed using foraminifera preserved in salt-marsh sedimentary archives.  The distribution of these organisms and sediments is controlled by the frequency and duration of tidal inundation making them useful sea-level indicators.  Andy uses composite chronologies to constrain the age of sediment samples and develop probabilistic age-depth models. The resulting sea-level records provide an appropriate and important geological context and constraint for future projections of future sea-level rise which is potentially one of the most costly and devastating consequences of climate change.

Andy is currently working as a Lab Associate with Shimon Anisfeld at Yale School of Forestry.