Evolution du trait de côte et progression de l’érosion en contexte transgressif – exemple du dernier cycle glaciaire-interglaciaire du Golfe de Corinthe (Grèce)

The coastal erosion or coastline retreat issue is today a major societal concern. How will rivers adjust their profiles in response to sea level rise? How far will the coast go up into the land? How can sediment inputs modulate coastal erosion? These major issues will profoundly affect future generations. In order to better characterize the processes affecting the evolution of the coasts (controlling mechanisms and rates / range), it is possible to analyze fossil examples, examples of the "past", to understand the mechanisms and their interactions, the final idea being to be able to formalize them. The Gulf of Corinth is an ideal natural laboratory to address this issue since it makes it possible to study different time scales, while analyzing the entire sediment pathway from the catchment areas to the most distal depositional areas ("source -to-sink "). This basin can also be considered a good analog because the sea level rise rates in "past" times are of the same order of magnitude as the current ones. 
The objective of this work will be to understand and quantify the feedback mechanisms between the dynamics of coastal erosion and that of continental erosion on time scales ranging from the historical scale to the geological scale. It will include a restoration of the architectures of the deposits, and related sedimentary budgets over the last 500 kyr by interlocking the time scales (kyr => 100's kyr). High resolution study will also be carried out from 12 kyr to present day. Then, the results obtained will have to be confronted to a geomorphological study to make the link between the processes, their interactions, the controlling factors. The ultimate purpose will be the quantification of all these phenomena. Eventually this reference case and the associated descriptors may be used to conceptualize and establish new numerical codes in order to model the evolution of coastlines in response to sea level rise and / or changes in the dynamics of marine environments (sea, ocean).