Past ice, present tides, future seas: context for resilient ecosystems.

Description

At a time where we experience an unprecedented pace in industrialisation of our seas, the quantified impacts on seabed mobility, benthic habitats and predator foraging success can deliver a robust and unified evidence base behind efficient habitats regulation assessments, strategic compensation advice and seabed monitoring approaches. The seabed offshore Liverpool and North Wales, and many other palaeo-glactiated areas around the world, was shaped through ice streaming many thousands of years ago. The impact on the seabed from ice in the past helps understand the impact from tides today, and reveals the best way the seabed can host ecosystem-supporting habitats and renewable energy infrastructure. Then we need to take into account the future, as the climate crisis alone will for instance mobilise sand and gravel by mid and end century in places where sand and gravel does not move today.

When tidal currents deviate around seabed infrastructure today, it can change the shape and composition of the seabed (i.e. more gravelly, sandy or muddy), especially when ice in the past left a mixture of those different sediments behind. This change happens both near the infrastructure and far away from it. In the near-field of seabed infrastructure, forces on the seabed will be dominated by turbulence in the wake of the objects. In the far-field, the cumulative effect of tidal flow alterations in the wake of infrastructure and future climate-driven changes to tides and waves can still influence seabed mobility and sediment composition significantly enough to modulate habitat suitability over various spatial and temporal scales. The seabed is the home to little fish that are eaten by larger animals like marine mammals and seabirds that dive to the seabed for their food. The impact on deep-diving seabirds using the seabed across different habitats depends on the fine-scale relationship between seabed, prey and predator, and sediments moved by tides play a key role in this relationship.

This research requires a wide range of people with diverse skills and perspectives often in cross-disciplinary teams, strengthening our current capability and confidence in observational and modelling approaches. Scientists who study changes to tides, seabed mobility/composition and marine ecosystems can thus help provide the context within which recovery of features and ecosystem services can be promoted, and in which marine net gain may happen at the same time as future climate crisis-adaptive and resilient offshore structures are designed.

Period	9 Sept 2025
Event title	Tidellites
Event type	Conference
Location	Liverpool, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International