NOTE: (I had this at the bottom of the post some people missed it so I moved it up to the top) I’m not convinced that this idea has any merit whatsoever, as I see more conventional reasons (like silting) for land recovery such as at Rome’s original harbor and in New York, but thought it was worth posting for the discussion that would ensue. Even bad science deserves to be discussed/disproven. See also a note below. – Anthony
Isostacy is a major Geological error.
Guest essay by Richard Guy
The Governments of the United States and Canada are concerned about the ebbing water levels in the Great Lakes. For years the water levels in the great lakes and other lakes have been declining without any signs of ever returning to previous levels. The best news is that there is no hope that the water levels will ever return. The bad news is that we have our heads stuck in the sand dunes which have been created on the shores of the great lakes as they recede.
What we have also failed to notice is that the process is speeding up faster than our ability to grasp the reality. The fact is that this process of ebbing lake and water levels has been going on since pre history but we are just becoming aware of it as more and more shoreline inhabitants observe the phenomenon.
Another major deterrent to our overall realization is that our thought processes are hampered, among other things, by the media hype of rising sea levels and Post Glacial Rebound. Post Glacial Rebound is a geological error which has been foisted on us for a long time. It is time that we outlaw this false concept of Glacial Rebound and release a new era of exiting discoveries which have remained hidden by this mistaken premise.
Isostatic Rebound was introduced into Geological theology over one hundred years ago and it has lead us astray. This theory of Iostacy was based on an original error in deduction. The error in deduction was that the land rose from the sea. This original error was compounded when the theory of Post Glacial Rebound was built on it. This led us even further away from the truth.
We will never solve the disappearing water problem until we face the reality that we have been mislead by Iostacy. We have to face this reality because this reality is now facing us: we are losing water all over the planet while we continue to harp on rising seas levels.
Once we abandon Isostatic Rebound we will see the reality of receding seas. This path will also lead us to other interesting discoveries such as why the seas recede.? Once we accept that seas are receding that acceptance will automatically eliminate Post Glacial Rebound. There is no time to waste because our survival depends on this acceptance.
What is really occurring is that the sea levels have been falling from pre historic times. Rivers have been draining the land and the lakes since pre-historic times. As Sea levels fall lower and lower the draining process moves faster and faster and we lose our wetlands as more and more land is left behind by the receding seas. Sand dunes now line the shores of the great lakes where people used to swim and boats used to be moored. Many marinas have been deserted leaving boats stranded on sand bars. This is also a cause of the amount of arid land which is increasing worldwide.
Graph from: http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/now/wlevels/dbd/
So it is wise at this stage to give the lie to rising sea levels and accept receding sea levels. This will not stop the water loss but it will make us understand what we have to do in order to preserve what little water we do have left.
New York is learning about receding seas because the marshes in Jamaica Bay are disappearing and drying up. New Jersey is dealing with the receding sea by selling off the new land left by the sea to Donald Trump and Playboy Hotels and Casinos. Donald Trump built his Taj Mahal Casino on these lands left by the receding sea.
Now that The State of New Jersey has discovered the land bonanza they are gaining as the sea recedes they have been looking over old survey maps to find out where the sea was back in 1776. They are proposing to claim retroactive taxes from landowners who have occupied these lands back to those historical times. They estimate that they have accumulated 830000 acres of land from the sea since 1776. The State of New York can make a similar claim as it includes long Island the Sounds and Brooklyn Shorelines. An exhibition by the New York Library in 2010 showed the mapping of the New York shoreline over three hundred years. The entire New York coastline has gained a quarter mile of land over that period.
So when we see the water levels falling in the Great lakes that is only the tip of the iceberg. Those levels have been falling for a very long time and will continue to do so. If we want to get a picture of what our earth will eventually look like just look at the face of the Planet Mars.
The first order of business is to get rid of the Isostatic Rebound theory and accept that our seas are receding as our planet expands. The sea is not rising. We will then see why our lakes are going dry. We will also understand that the only thing we can do about it is to keep dredging our waterways harbours and lakes to keep things moving. That was all three Emperors of Rome could do to keep the Harbour at Ostia open: they were finally defeated. It took Nero, Trajan and Articus one hundred years of dredging before they gave up the fight against the receding sea. Today Ostia is three miles from the sea and twenty feet above sea level.
The Port Authority in New York is having to blast bedrock, for the first time, to keep the harbour channels open. The sea keeps getting shallower and the seagoing vessels keep getting larger. Ships keep demanding deeper depths.
Our Planet Earth is dynamic. It is a masterful creation not unlike other planets in the Cosmos. The earth does not reveal her secrets readily and her secrets are often presented to us as a mirror image of what is really happening. So when we observe that land is rising it may just be a mirror image: our seas are receding.
###
Richard Guy is a Structural Engineer. P.Eng, Mse, West London University. He has worked in several countries worldwide. He has written three books on Receding Seas and allied Phenomena. He lectures, writes and does radio and TV interviews. He has built Airports, Refineries, Highways on lands left behind by the receding sea
See: The Mysterious Receding Seas on Amazon
===============================================================
UPDATE: for those who never read past the first few paragraphs to see my caveat, I’ve now moved it up top for better visibility.
Some people asked why I should publish “rubbish science” like this. The reason is the same that I often publish some “rubbish science”from climatology; it deserves ridicule for the ridiculous premise of the idea.
At some point, when the next ice age kicks in, we will start to see the seas recede. We are nowhere close to that.
The new land that Mr. Guy sees is from silting deposition. For example the delta of the Mississippi river continues to grow each year for that reason.
Plus, with GPS enabled altimetry systems, we can now actually measure isotasy changes. – Anthony
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The article’s bad not-even-science is disconcerting, but it’s true that “isostatic rebound” is exaggerated. The defining feature of rock is that it’s uncompressible. Therefore isostatic rebound has to work convectively, where solid materials re-arrange themselves, but that doesn’t feature in any isostatic rebound model. Today the notion of “isostatic rebound” is abused to where it’s modelled to be contributing to global sea level rises, where no rise is measured, because the sea beds are supposedly “isostatically” expanding due to increased water weight. Good reason to throw the bathwater out with no need to check first for babies, etc.
“”””””……Ric Werme says:
August 31, 2013 at 2:11 pm
M Courtney says:
August 31, 2013 at 1:44 pm
This is the worst article I’ve read here since “CO2 will condense out of the atmosphere in the Polar Night”.
Antarctic!
I’ve been avoiding that episode for years. And you didn’t even help out! Grr. 🙂
Finally, here is a post that I wouldn’t mind seeing hijacked into a CO2 frost discussion. It’s actually worthwhile for people who weren’t here then to read some of the posts and commentary. You really don’t have to comment on it though!……””””””
Pure ignorance was entirely responsible for sucking me into that CO2 snow fiasco; I’ll blame it on my lack of a good CO2 phase diagram (now corrected).
Fortunately Phil (the real Phil) ‘splained it all to my satisfaction, before I had dug myself all the way to China.
As I often preach; ignorance is not a disease; we are all born with it.
George
PS I really did encounter a “polar scientist” decked out in his foulies , including Antarctica boots, in the YMCA hotel, in Christchurch NZ (in the elevator actually), who claimed to have walked in those very boots on CO2 snow at the South Pole. He is probably still getting grants funded !
@DirkH
“Earth constantly loses atmospheric molecules to space due to solar wind etc, so why do you assume constancy? Makes no sense.
Water bound in the mantle is no longer water. Do you count all the H and O atoms to arrive at how much water there is? Again, nonsensical.”
The upper atmosphere contains virtually no H2O molecules for any significant water to be lost. by leakage into space.
As for the deep mantle try this
http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth.html. This is water as water (hydrates) and not just its component elements. Water is continuously – but slowly – released and absorbed from the deep mantle by volcanic and tectonic activity at unknown rates.
Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the quantity of water – as water substance (in all its phases) on earth is largely constant and has been for a very long time. In any event the balance between liquid water and ice means that sea levels will rise until this interglacial ends and then drop with the approach of the next glacial. And levels will rise again with the next interglacial..http://ktwop.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/when-this-interglacial-ends/
In any event Guy’s theory remains illogical and far-fetched..
I think ISO Stacy might have something to say about the standard of this article.
Amusing read though.
but thought it was worth posting for the discussion that would ensue.
Perhaps Anthony was seeing if any would bite?
In two hours, 51 comments, Not one believed it credible, most found it rubbish and badly spelled, several thought it humerous. One offered some observational support, but found the theory unsupported. Not a bad response from a bunch of skeptics.
I was looking through the USGCS website. NOAA doesn’t make it easy to search online for historical records of USCGS benchmark measurements. But there is a CORS network of stations.
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS_Map/
Here is the long-term record from station USNO (US Naval Observatory, near Wash. D.C,
1997-2011 (why it doesn’t continue to 2013 is a question unanswered.) ftp://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cors/Plots/Longterm/usno_08.long.png
And an short term record about 12 weeks of 2013.
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-cors/corsage.prl?site=USNO
Oddly the short term is in units of cm and the long term in units of mm.
It is not long enough to show Isostacy, but plenty of seasonal and earth tide movement.
@Stephen Fisher Rasey,
I thought a lot of people would point out to Mr. Guy just how silly his premise is. Instead what happened is many people never read past the first few paragraphs, completely missed my caveat, and started flaming me for posting ‘bad science”. Well that was the idea. Just like when we call out bad climate science claims, so did this one need to be called out. I moved my original caveat up to the the top, and placed a second new one at the bottom for the reading challenged.
“””””…..NZ Willy says:
August 31, 2013 at 2:41 pm
The article’s bad not-even-science is disconcerting, but it’s true that “isostatic rebound” is exaggerated. The defining feature of rock is that it’s uncompressible. …..”””””
Careful there Willie, nothing; not even diamond, is incompressible, or uncompressible, or ancompressible, or encompressible, or even oncompressible !
First the “Greenland ice sheet is only 650 years old” and now this? Is this supposed to some sort of bad science freak show?
Henry BowmN says:
August 31, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Actually post-glacial rebound (now called glacial isostatic adjustment) has been around & increasingly well supported since the 18th century, thanks initially to no less a figure than Anders Celsius. While of course not originally attributed to glaciation, the phenomenon was observed in Sweden.
Previously, it appeared that sea level in Sweden was falling. Celsius made marks in rock on different locations along the Swedish coast. By 1765, after his death, it could be concluded that sea levels weren’t falling but the land rising unevenly.
A century later, Thomas Jamieson proposed the theory that rising land was caused by the end of the ice age, known since the 1830s to have occurred thousands of years earlier. Gerard De Geer’s study of old shorelines in Scandinavia confirmed his theory in 1890.
I have to say the “rainfall in Australia caused sea levels to drop” seems as dumb to me as the “no such thing as isostatic rebound” theory.
Several points (in no particular order):
This all should be really rather easy to check – GPS measurements from space taken from a reasonably consistent altitude above the surface should provide the ‘objective’ perspective to assess what’s moving in relation to what. Plenty easy to tell if the land is rising or the water level falling from the right perspective. If one is measuring from the coast of a rising land mass AND a falling water level it’s tougher to say with certainty what’s happening.
Those people suggesting that water is ‘lost’ to subduction at tectonic plate margins are forgetting that such losses are part of a cycle and that eventually, a significant portion of the water ‘lost’ during subduction is ‘recovered’ during volcanic activity. It may take a million years, but the water will be recovered.
Water is lost to space, but it is also constantly recovered through space objects striking the atmosphere, burning up and giving up whatever water they held internally.
As with most theories one hears about this calamity and that disaster, I saw no attempt to define these events temporally – just that it’s happening ‘faster’ and there’s a strongly implied sense of ‘soon’. If Earth is losing its water and it’s going to be gone in a thousand years, that’s a big deal problem. If Earth is going to lose it over the next five billion years, it’s probably not all that important. A comet or asteroid strike, a gamma ray burst, a Siberian Traps scale volcanic cataclysm, a re-reunification of the land masses, or death of Sol will have probably happened long before our water is gone. In fact, from most descriptions one reads about the death of a star like Sol, the expansion to red giant will probably boil our water off entirely anyway. The author makes the point that we’re just now able to see the nature of the problem, from which I infer that this is a process that been happening all along, but we just hadn’t noticed. If that’s the case, and it’s taken 4.5 billion years for it to become noticeable, then doesn’t that sort of imply we’ve got some time left?
Guy should visit Troy. This thriving port of several thousand years ago is now 14 kilometers from the sea. Imagine how that fact would improve his thesis!
Re: Marcos at 2:09pm
Then, there’s Palermo, Italy (for just one of many such examples), founded in 800 B.C. …
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/439625/Palermo
LOL, that the folks at E. Britannica ask at the bottom of the above page:
I just could not bring myself to write: “That it is still right beside the Mediterranean. (See (cite above article with a LOL)).”
*****************
BTW, Marcos, such discoveries as you cited are, indeed, helpful, for they prove that sloooowly rising sea levels will never be a crisis for humans.
@anthony
re; REPLY: How could you miss the caveat at the bottom? I moved it up top for the reading challenged – Anthony
Oh thanks a lot! I do like your blog …. but,
I am afraid if you are “empirically based”, you will have to admit that in this case the post’s writer was more likely “writing challenged” than the reader “reading challenged”. What if we come to read this blog now, rather than hoping to read some good or controversial science point by a guest author b, we need to read all the minutiae. I like your blog and have read it a bunch as I get both sides I am a geologist who is a skeptic) … but in this case I would have to say you were “writing challenged”.
Fed-up says:
August 31, 2013 at 2:56 pm
An article on water subduction which might be of interest to you:
http://phys.org/news169906990.html
Science knows so little about the subduction/volcanic water cycle that it can’t even say how much water may lie under the continents & oceans. It does appear however that water lubricates plate tectonic activity.
Mr. Guy has told us more than he knows.
Oh yes … and any grammar/spelling/editing mistakes were intentional … to make a sarcastic point about “writing challenged”. Haha!
=============================================================================
There are those who see their hypothesis’ about tree rings as not just having the ring of truth but actually being the truth. What their minds produced is the center of all. Being the center of all, as their heads expand so does the Earth.
GREAT POST, ANTHONY! It elicited much excellent discussion and promoted truth (no thanks to Mr. Guy, I’m afraid).
#(:))
Anthony Watts says:
August 31, 2013 at 2:55 pm
@Stephen Fisher Rasey,
I thought a lot of people would point out to Mr. Guy just how silly his premise is. Instead what happened is many people never read past the first few paragraphs, completely missed my caveat, and started flaming me for posting ‘bad science”. Well that was the idea. Just like when we call out bad climate science claims, so did this one need to be called out. I moved my original caveat up to the the top, and placed a second new one at the bottom for the reading challenged.
—————————————————————————
I twigged on as soon as I read the header.
Claim: ‘Post Glacial Rebound is a Myth’
@clipe, yep, any time I doubt/disbelieve something up front, I precede it with the word Claim
Hansen claimed once the oceans would boil, Gore claimed once the Earth’s mantle is “millions of degrees”.
D.P. 3:05 — bahdah — bing — bahdah — boom. Nice one.
Raise funds to send this idiot to North Dakota so he can walk the Herman Beach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Beach
ridge north into Manitoba. It is the highest beach of Glacial Lake Agassiz and was level when formed some 12,000 years ago. It is now over 300m higher at the northern end. We also provide him with a book explaining isostasy and eustasy that he can read in his tent at night as he escapes the mosquitos and black fly.
The idea of the ‘expanding earth’ is (or was) a semi-respectable theory. The great Arthur Holmes treated it seriously in various editions of his textbook, and Anthony Hallam thought it was a possible explanation for an apparent very-long-term trend for the land surface area of the earth to increase. But of course earth expansion at the rate postulated by its advocates would be far too slow to account for the observed local changes in land/sea level on a time scale of a few thousand years.
“UPDATE: for those who never read past the first few paragraphs to see my caveat, I’ve now moved it up top for better visibility.
Some people asked why I should publish “rubbish science” like this. The reason is the same that I often publish some “rubbish science”from climatology; it deserves ridicule for the ridiculous premise of the idea.
At some point, when the next ice age kicks in, we will start to see the seas recede. We are nowhere close to that.”
Related question. If mile or two of ice on continent depresses/deformed the surface, does the 140 meter addition of ocean sea level, depress ocean floor?
So Greenland is 2.166 million square km and kilometers high ice.
South Pacific: 165.2 million km square km having added 140 meter over last 10,000 years.
So 80 times more area.
Or if removed 140 meters of water from South Pacific should there be more rebound as compared to remove all ice from Greenland.
And having such large areas with less vertical weight but greater total weight, would tend create more lateral direction- tend to push continents up and/or cause more tectonic plate movement, but also have a vertical component.
What can you say about an article in which even the title is wrong for starters? Long before GPS, isostatic rebound has been measured for more than half a century in North America and Europe. For example, older shorelines of the Great Lakes were surveyed and found to be tilted due to greater uplift to the north toward the center of the Laurentide ice sheet where the ice was thickest. The author has a muddled understanding of even the rudiments of geophysics, geology, and coastal geomorphology, especially the role of rivers and sedimentation.
The article appears to be advertising for his book, which would be a great addition to a space on my bookshelves devoted to amusing crackpot drivel.
ktwop says:
August 31, 2013 at 2:45 pm
“As for the deep mantle try this
http://www.livescience.com/1312-huge-ocean-discovered-earth.html.
”
Thanks; very interesting idea!