University of Cambridge: science festival – CBESS (2012

Once again, CBESS was well represented at the University of Cambridge Science Festival on 12 March 2016, with a wide range of demonstrations on how tides and waves shape the UK coastline.

CBESS’s Ben Evans (far right) surveys the sea-level rise tower, the Festival’s log (‘pop a coloured ball in the tube and come on in’) of visitors to the Cambridge watery demonstrations. Here sea level approaches the level expected in New Orleans by 2416. In all, over 300 visitors experienced the coastal displays and demonstrations. — CBESS’s Ben Evans (far right) surveys the sea-level rise tower, the Festival’s log (‘pop a coloured ball in the tube and come on in’) of visitors to the Cambridge watery demonstrations. Here sea level approaches the level expected in New Orleans by 2416.

Activities centered around ‘shifting sands’, a large-scale projection and sound-scape installation in association with Toby Smith, Artist in Residence at the University of Cambridge Conservation Institute, with an interactive ‘sand box’ on coastal change; through ‘mobile muds’, featuring measuring waves and saltmarsh accretion and demonstrations on the flora and fauna on and within fine sediments in the intertidal zone; to the sold-out ‘water, water, everywhere’, generating a mini storm surge in the Department of Geography’s wave flume, sea defence breaching and the destruction (to the delight of younger visitors) of our lego village. The whole event was masterminded by CBESS’s Iris Möller, with support from CBESS members Tom Spencer and Ben Evans.

In all, over 300 visitors experienced the coastal displays and demonstrations.

CBESS Principal Investigator Tom Spencer gets (over) excited next to the rods of the CBESS Sedimentation – Elevation Table (SET), deployed in earnest at the CBESS sites in the Essex Estuaries and Morecambe Bay to measure rates and patterns of saltmarsh surface accretion.

Dr Tom Spencer, University of Cambridge