Introduction

This introductory chapter of Handbook of Sea-Level Research provides a gist of the concepts covered in this book. With the range of technology available today, we can measure changes in sea-level every few minutes with tide gauges and across entire oceans using satellites. Yet these offer only a small part of the wider picture. We need to bring together the evidence across a range of timescales for a complete analysis. This book illustrates approaches and methods that have produced observations, analyses, and interpretations which have then stood the test of scrutiny by peers, mainly through the review process of scientific journal publication, but also at conferences and field discussion meetings. The approaches developed at such events will lead the reader tackle new questions on sea-level change, and propose answers based on carefully collected observations, analyses, and models developed in the field and the laboratory from sites all over the world.