{"id":7947,"date":"2011-06-20T19:18:51","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T00:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/?p=7947"},"modified":"2025-11-03T07:21:43","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T12:21:43","slug":"2000-years-of-sea-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2011\/06\/2000-years-of-sea-level\/","title":{"rendered":"2000 Years of Sea Level (+updates)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A group of colleagues have succeeded in producing the first continuous proxy record of sea level for the past 2000 years. According to this reconstruction, 20th-Century sea-level rise on the U.S. Atlantic coast is faster than at any time in the past two millennia.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Good data on past sea levels is hard to come by. Reconstructing the huge rise at the end of the last glacial (120 meters<\/a>) is not too bad, because a few meters uncertainty in sea level or a few centuries in dating don\u2019t matter all that much. But to trace the subtle variations of the last millennia requires more precise methods.<\/p>\n

Eine \u00dcbersetzung in deutsch finden Sie hier<\/a>.<\/lang_de>
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Andrew Kemp, Ben Horton and Jeff Donnelly have developed such a method. They use sediments in salt marshes along the coast<\/a>, which get regularly flooded by tides. When sea level rises the salt marsh grows upwards, because it traps sediments. The sediment layers accumulating in this way can be examined and dated. Their altitude as it depends on age already provides a rough sea level history.<\/p>\n

How is sea level reconstructed?<\/strong><\/p>\n

But then comes the laborious detail. Although on average the sediment buildup follows sea level, it sometimes lags behind when sea level rises rapidly, or catches up when sea level rises more slowly. Therefore we want to know how high, relative to mean sea level, the salt marsh was located at any given time. To determine this, we can exploit the fact that each level within the tidal range is characterized by a particular set of organisms that live there. This can be analyzed e.g. from the tiny shells of foraminifera<\/a> (or forams for short) found in the sediment. For this purpose, the species and numbers of forams need to be determined under the microscope for each centimeter of sediment.
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\nThe foram Trochammina inflata under the microscope<\/small><\/center><\/p>\n

To get a continuous record of good resolution, we need a site with a rapid, continuous sea level rise. Kemp and colleagues used salt marshes in North Carolina, where the land has steadily sunk by about two meters in the past two millennia due to glacial isostatic adjustment<\/a>. Thus a roughly 2.5 meters long sediment core is obtained. The effect of land subsidence later needs to be subtracted out in order to obtain the sea level rise proper.<\/p>\n


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\nBen Horton and Reide CorbettPostdocs Andy Kemp and Simon Engelhart<\/del> in the field at Tump Sand<\/del> Point, one of the study sites [Sorry for photo mix-up]<\/ins><\/small><\/center><\/p>\n

How did sea level evolve?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The graph shows how sea level changed over the past 2000 years. There are four phases:<\/p>\n