Welcome to my website! Here, I will guide you through the work I am working on as well as the work that has kept me busy and raised my interests in the recent past.

I am a researcher focusing on coastal geology, and in particular on the different scales of response that the coast has. By focusing on the coast, I have been working in many of the different environments that we can find at present in our coasts, including the area between the shoreface and the dunes, and lagoons.

Why the coast?

Dynamic environments

Sandy coasts are highly dynamic environments where changes induced by the impact of winds, waves, tides and currents are constantly happening. The cumulative result of these determines the shape of the coast, which may also evolve over time leaving or not the record of these changes in the sedimentary archive. As highly dynamic environments, coasts represent challenging environments because of their relatively low preservation potentials, and the relatively high number of factors, including internal and external, involved on their shaping.

By looking into the coastal archive we can reconstruct the evolution of the coast, contribute to the understanding of the long term evolution, and inform about the different ways of response that the coast may adopt at longer time scales. However, before approaching these questions at a specific site we should address and keep on mind the following: Is there a possibility of record preservation? What can be left in the record? What we can learn from the sedimentary record in the coastal environments? Can we use this information to project future changes in the coast?

Living at the coast

Of course, a major motivation behind coastal geomorphology research is our tight relation with the coast, which has been seen and used since very early times as the best place to live, to develop our activities and to enjoy. Despite this vision, coasts can also hide hazards that may turn into real problems or even destroy coastal settlements due to the constant changes of the coast in response to internal and external factors.