NRF Award to Asst Prof Aron Meltzner to study sea level, earthquake and tsunami hazards
Congratulations to Asst Prof Aron Meltzner, principal investigator of EOS and ASE, for being awarded the highly competitive NRF Fellowship award, aimed at top scientists at the beginning of their career. This award is designed for a small number of excellent scientists, who show promise to become leaders in their respective fields of research, to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk research.
Asst Prof Aron Meltzner’s research field spans earthquake geology and sea-level change at timescales from centuries to millennia, with implications for understanding and preventing natural hazards. The awarded project, entitled Sea-level and land-level change in Southeast Asia: A geological approach to quantifying hazard from rising seas and earthquakes, is going to fill gaps of reliable geological data for Singapore and the Southeast Asian region, necessary for identifying earthquakes hazards and making projections of sea-level rise, that are not possible with the data currently available.
Sea-level change is a growing threat to Singapore and the hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas in Southeast Asia. Adaptation of human societies to this major environmental change requires knowledge on the rate and scale of the rise, which varies around the globe. This kind of knowledge requires models tuned to high-precision regional sea-level proxy records spanning thousands of years, data that do not exist for most of Southeast Asia. Likewise, though Singapore is generally considered earthquake safe, the potential earthquake hazard from tectonic faults cutting across the island of Singapore is not known. Asst Prof Meltzner’s project will provide better geological data for Singapore and the Southeast Asian region, enabling necessary assessment and mitigation of these serious hazards.
By quantifying the relative contributions to sea-level rise of coastal tectonics, climate-induced sea-level change, and the local isostatic response to the load of glacial meltwater on the sea floor, the current project will provide crucial understanding of the environmental impacts of these processes and will help avoid under-appreciation of the risk of coastal flooding. By collecting data from strategically chosen sites, using high-quality proxy data, and collaborating with modelers, Asst Prof Meltzner will address both the sea level and potential earthquake problems facing the Singapore region.
For more information on Asst Prof Meltzner and his research, see:
https://earthobservatory.sg/research-group/geology-earthquakes-and-sea-level-aron-meltzner
https://earthobservatory.sg/project/sea-level-and-land-level-change-southeast-asia-geological-approach-quantifying-hazard-rising
https://earthobservatory.sg/project/luzon-paleoseismology-and-paleogeodesy-constraining-short-and-long-term-tectonic-deformation
https://earthobservatory.sg/project/paleoseismology-and-paleogeodesy-sumatran-subduction-zone