Seminar - Humans as agents of coastal geomorphic change
Speaker: Prof. Eli Lazarus - University of Southampton (UK) | Wednesday 26 March 2025 | 4,30 pm - Arduino Classroom
26.03.2025
Published in Progress in Physical Geography three decades ago, “Beaches and dunes of human-altered coasts” by Karl Nordstrom (Nordstrom, 1994), has proven remarkably prescient. The scale, dominance, and rapid sprawl of human impacts on physical coastal environments had some traction in the 1990s as a worrisome societal problem, but academic circles tended to badge – and dismiss – the topic as parochial. What distinguishes Nordstrom's contribution, even now, is his clear conception of human-altered coasts as dynamic environments unto themselves, where expressions of physical phenomena warranted fundamental geomorphic research. To have any hope of understanding patterns and trajectories of physical change along human-altered coasts – let alone planning for and managing them – coastal research must address that dynamical divergence, turning "the geomorphic significance of human agency" into "an integral component of landscape evolution" rather than "an aberration". This seminar uses Nordstrom's foundational work to explore the role of humans as agents of coastal geomorphic change.
This seminar is supported by the “Shaping a World-Class University” initiative of the University of Padua, under the project “Geomorphic Feedbacks and Emergent Risk on Human-Altered Coasts” (Macro-Area of Intervention: Internationalization of the Curriculum, Project Category: Short-Term Visiting Professors)
