About
The 2nd edition of the North Sea Conference will be organized in Ostend, Belgium between 1 and 3 December 2026. Find out more about the venue here.
This edition’s theme ’Shifting Shores: New Horizons in Quaternary studies of the North Sea’ aims to share knowledge on research discoveries made since 2019 into the nature and evolution of the environment and landscape of the central and southern North Sea, and the English Channel. Key themes will include:
- Mapping and investigating the Quaternary subsurface record
- Palaeolandscape reconstructions and geoarchaeology
- Quaternary ice limits and submerged (peri)glacial landscapes
- Past climate and sea-level records
- Advances in research and mapping approaches
The provisional conference timeline is available online.
Organisation
The North Sea Conference 2026 is being organized by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), Ghent University, the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) & Geological Survey of Belgium (GSB), and the Geological Survey of the Netherlands (TNO-GDN). More information about these institutes can be found here.
History of the North Sea Conference
The first edition of the international North Sea conference, with its full title ‘From the North Sea lowlands to the Celtic shelf edge: reconstructing changing environments for the past 500 kyrs’ took place in Utrecht between 18 and 20 November 2019.
This meeting aimed at exchanging and linking knowledge about Middle Pleistocene to contemporary geological processes and landscape development for the southern North Sea, the Channel and the Celtic Sea; providing an update on direct and indirect evidence of human presence in and colonisation of now submerged landscapes; building an inventory of opportunities to jointly benefit from the wealth of new subsurface data collected in the context of offshore wind farm development; and discuss potential topics and funding mechanisms for research that brings together late Quaternary sediment archives from north to south.
This meeting was organized by dr. S. van Heteren and M.A.M. Vissinga-Schalkwijk (TNO – Geological Survey of the Netherlands), dr. T. Missiaen (Flanders Marine Institute), prof. dr. M. De Batist (Ghent University), prof. dr. V. Gaffney (University of Bradford) and prof. dr. G.J. Reichart (NIOZ en Utrecht University).