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Tom Holmes

"I'm finding out how storms affect coastal ecosystems and the benefits that we get from them. I collect tubes of soil, called soil cores, which allow you to look back in time and find clues about what the environment was like then. By measuring the size of grains from different depths in my soil cores I can see when there were big coastal storms over the last 100 years. This is because the storms washed sand onto the saltmarsh. I also analyse the chemicals in the soil and look at the pollen grains to see if and how the saltmarshes changed following each storm. This work helps me to understand how well and how quickly saltmarshes recover if they are damaged by storms. This is important because climate change is likely to make coastal storms worse and happen more often."