Europe's shape is constantly changing: the Mediterranean basin is shrinking, the Alps are pushing north and Scandinavia is still rebounding after being crushed by ice sheets in the ice age.
Eurocores' Topo-Europe programme (4-D Topography Evolution in Europe: Uplift, Subsidence and Sea Level Change) will explain what Europe looked like in the past, what processes controlled these changes and what the future has in store.
Topo-Europe is the European Collaborative Research Scheme's (Eurocores) largest programme, with 10 collaborative research projects (CRPs) involving 16 national funding organisations and an overall budget of approximately EUR15m (GBP12.7m).
The programme began in El Escorial near Madrid in October 2008 during the fourth Topo-Europe International Workshop.
Topo-Europe covers topics such as: inter alia, earth crust and mantle dynamics, source-to-sink relationships and sediment dynamics, plateau formation and plate-reorganisation.
One of the programme's collaborative research projects, Resel-Grace, looks into refining European sea level estimations by combining altimetry, tide gauges and other data with improved glacial isostatic adjustment modelling and tailored regional gravity field models that reflect the redistribution of water masses.
Anny Cazenave of Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in Toulouse, France, said: 'Most important now is to study the impacts of sea level rise and here hardly anything has been done.
'The rise, the sedimentology, the tectonics, ocean dynamics and climate need to be combined to develop models for the impacts.' In Resel-Grace, Cazenave will identify the most vulnerable ecosystems and economies such as the Nile Delta or the Adriatic and assess the impacts of sea-level rise and the risk of flooding.
Topo-Europe has opened up 50 to 60 positions for young researchers.
