Coastal Geology Research - Coastal Carolina University
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Coastal Geology Research

Areas of Research
  • Coastal processes, beach erosion, and shoreline migration (Paul Gayes, Patrick Limber, Zhixiong Shen, Eric Wright)
  • Geologic development and sedimentology of coastal, shelf, and wetland environments (Till Hanebuth, Zhixiong Shen, Richard Viso, Eric Wright)
  • Landscape evolution (Patrick Limber, Eric Wright)
  • Quanternary Geochronology, sea level change, and fluvial coastal geology (Zhixiong Shen)
Faculty
  • April Abbott, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor) is a sea-going marine geochemist working with modern and ancient marine sediments. Her research interests span isotope geochemistry, marine sediments and diagenesis, ocean chemistry, sediment-water interactions, and paleoclimate. Her research group uses a variety of sedimentological and geochemical tools to understand the sedimentary response to environmental conditions, the impact of sediment composition on chemical cycling, and how we use sediments to understand Earth's past climates. Dr. Abbott earned her Ph.D. from the College of Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University (CEOAS, OSU), M.S. from the University of Minnesota Duluth, and B.S. from Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She was the 2022 recipient of The Oceanographic Society's Early Career Award. For more information, visit Dr. Abbott's research page or Google Scholar Profile.

  • Till J.J. “Dr. Till” Hanebuth, Ph.D. (Associate Professor) is the head of the Coastal Geosystems Research Lab, which works on a variety of coastal and marine topics from rivers to the deep ocean with intense national and international collaboration: Sea level and subsidence; coastal evolution and stratigraphy; waterway silting issues; microplastics and heavy metals in sediment; hydro- and sediment-dynamic monitoring (sensor networks); geophysical surveying (bathymetry, sidescan sonar, subbottom echosounder); reconstructions of past oceanographic and climatic conditions. Dr. Till got his Ph.D. at GEOMAR (Kiel, Germany) in 2000, was a postdoc scholar at the Geological Survey of Japan, Assistant Professor and Heisenberg Fellow at MARUM/University of Bremen (Germany) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI/MA), before arriving at Coastal in 2014. Visit his profiles on CMSS research, Researchgate, Google Scholar, and the Coastal Geosystems Lab on
    Facebook.

  • Patrick "Pat" Limber, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor) uses numerical models and remote sensing to understand how coastlines change through time. He is interested in coastal cliff erosion, large-scale coastline evolution, and human-coastline interactions. Prior to arriving at Coastal Carolina, Pat was a Mendenhall Fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey and received a B.A. from SUNY-Purchase College, an M.S. from UC-Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. from Duke University. Click here to view Pat Limber's Google Scholar profile.
  • Zhixiong Shen, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor) received his B.Sc. from the Department of Urban and Environmental Sciences at Peking University, China in 2002 and his Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of Liverpool, Britain in 2007. Shen worked as a McWilliams Postdoctoral Research Associate during 2007-2012 and a Research Assistant Professor during 2012-2014 at Tulane University, and joined Coastal Carolina University in August 2014. Shen has research interests in quaternary geochronology, earth surface processes, neotectonics, environmental change, sea-level change, and fluvial and coastal geology.
  • Eric Wright, Ph.D. (Professor) is a marine and coastal geologist. His research interests focus on the geologic development and sedimentology of coastal, shelf, and wetland environments.