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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Does posting bad science get more clicks?
gbaikie says:
August 31, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Some CACA scare mongers have suggested that rising sea levels, supposedly due to man-made GHGs, could trigger earthquakes & tsunamis as a result of the greater weight of water over depressed, thin oceanic crust.
We have a “baby and the bathwater” problem here.
Also the Unique Solution Syndrome in evidence: the inistence of a one-only solution to a perceived problem.
There are multiple reasons, as many writers noted above, for sea levels to change relative to shorelines. But on a geological time frame of tens of thousands or millions of years, some strange recurrent, signficant sea level rises and falls have occurred. All geologists who work the interior stratigraphic succession have seen shallow and deep patterns – and not just facies/environmental changes due to processes swingling back and forth along the coastline (like the lateral movement of the Mississippi delta). There are repeated, small erosional surface all through the rock record. Even back in the Devonian, a time of world-wide carbonate reefs on the submerged cratons, there are these minor unconformities – actually called “disconformities” as they are near-to-parallel to bedding planes. There was relative uplift on firmly anchored, massive carbonates that brought beds that were formerly severeal meters below the sea surface to above the surface over huge areas. The North American intereior seaway shows these through the Cretaceous right to the Tertiary boundary in coal beds that advance and then retreat seaward.
With the Cretaceous, it is easy to arm-wave about mountain-building – in pulses, of course, which then begs the question (why do mountains build episodically?). The seas both rose and fell (relative to the coastline) several meters at a time and suddenly. But during non-mountain building events, i.e. during quiet times when continents and oceanic plates weren’t smacking into each other, these pulses were also present.
The idea of a “breathing” Earth has been a theory for a long time. Certainly it makes sense for a cooling Earth: if the mantle cools, there is a necessary contraction of the planet. If our core warms through a long-since stabilized centre of uranium and other fissile material (plus tidal flexing), then this energy must fade through time and the planet cool as a body. Theories exist, however, that the uraniferous material is recirculated by internal conventions and all this circulation cools in cycles (due to inertial forces of the moving mantle and threshold effects that keep the cooling going longer than one would expect, and heat the core longer on the rebound than one would expect). Even if these warming and cooling events are tiny to the point of non-observation (but I’m sure Trenberth and Hansen could find the evidence if they used enough computers and models) it would not take much to expand or contract the planetary surface sufficient to create a sea-level movement of 10m.
The other way, of course, is not to change the radius of the planet at all, but change the density of the upper mantle on which the continents float. Were the upper mantle to cool enough, the continental granites would float higher. In the same vein, a more vigoursly churning, hotter upper mantle could push the continents higher – and lead to more vulcanism. Which we see at times.
At the end of this consideration, there is probably a case for up and down movements of the continents outside of glacial loading and unloading. I’ve been to the shores of Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean, and I can say from personal experience that the lands in both places used to be signficantly lower relative to the sea shore than now: something like 26m on Banks Island in the north. The land between Hudson Bay and Winnipeg is measurably rising. Hudson Bay and Labrador was a center of extremely thick continental glaciers only 15,000 years ago. Glacial eustastic movement is clear, and it is clear (from the Hudson Bay relict shorelines) that the process has been episodic, with periods of stability. But we do not need to find one solution for similar situations, just as the police do not need to look for a shooter every time they find a dead body.
Comic relief (sort of):
“… the Sun is made of, uh, blobs of matter, whatever… .”
Earth is Expanding — NOT! (by Turbo Cpt. 1)
OT maybe, but picking up on sunshinehours1 comment above, referring to Fasullo’s paper on the Australian 2010-11 weather events swallowing the water:
I missed this first time around. Like this article, also likely to be bunk.
The major flooding Fasullo refers to was the result of rain falling WEST of the Great Dividing Range flowing EAST back into the Pacific. Like it has done numerous times in the past and will continue to do in the future. Fasullo needs to enlarge his mapping a bit, and pick up all the catchments, not just Georgina and Diamantina. Start with the Burdekin, then go south.
claimsguy says:
August 31, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Does posting bad science get more clicks?
Ask Lew
Stephan Rasey says: “several thought it humerous.
Well put, I too would keep it at arm’s length. : > )
From his website, here are his two ideas about how this globe is expanding: (the caps are his)
1. ACCRETION OF MATTER FROM SPACE GRADUALLY INCREASING EARTH’S MASS, GRAVITY, SURFACE AREA AND DIAMETER
2. INTERNAL CORE EXPANSION BY TECTONIC FORCE OF EXPANDING MAGMA MELTED BY GRAVITY-GENERATED COMPRESSIVE HEAT
Guy’s hypothesis explains the missing heat. It’s in the center of the Earth causing the planet to expand like blowing up a balloon. Better stop all that deep drilling for fracking or we just might deflate the whole planet.
(satire alert)
The sea level rise has remained on the same long term trend line:
http://oi51.tinypic.com/28tkoix.jpg
It goes up; it goes down.
For more than a hundreed years, La Jolla, California has had no discernable rise or fall. [it’s a gif: give it time to load]
Also, the Great Lakes are not steadily losing water; their levels are cyclical.
So I don’t think the planet is losing water. John Daly also made a very strong case that sea levels are not rising as fast as the UoC claims, either. Before the Envisat satellite data was “adjusted” to fit the ‘rising sea level’ narrative, it showed declining sea levels. And of course, the models were wrong, as usual.
This is all part of the natural ebb and flow of our planet. But for those who have a need to be scared, sea levels work as well as anything, I suppose.
milodonharlani – subduction, is it water under the plates or methane hydrates?
I’ve been wondering why Mars is so arid all over, but with past geologic evidence of flowing water.
This is speculation: could Mars’ interior have cooled off enough to allow liquid water to descend? The earth has oceans because of its molten core. Water turns to steam, thus keeping the water from percolating down into the mantle. Oceans are held up by steam pressure.
But if a planet’s interior was cool enough, then the water would remain liquid, and gravity would pull it down leaving the surface dry as a bone.
I realize Venus has a hot interior and it is also dry. But as stated, I’m just speculating. It’s not any crazier than this article.☺
I don’t see how silting can explain the difference in relative levels between the port of Ostia Antica and the sea. The same can be said of Ephesus. Perhaps sea levels were higher during the Roman warm period?
Where do you start to discredit his thesis without appearing insulting? I would start with the Great Lakes. You would have to know the rate of emptying and the rate of filling to say anything about lake levels. Then move on to ocean levels. Why are levels increasing in some areas and decreasing in others? I can’t see this observation being supported under this gentlemen’s thesis.
The Earth should be contracting as it loses heat. Assuming there is no net loss in water (how do we even know this) then it will cover a great surface over time (rising levels). Oh, then there is the climate but we know that isn’t changing…
But it raises an interesting point. Global warming deniers almost unanimously defending the consensus.
dbstealey says:
August 31, 2013 at 4:21 pm
——————————————-
Your thesis is just as crazy. The oceans are held up by steam pressure? I always thought they were held up by impermeable sediments.
Huh? I thought everyone knew the “lost” water was building up as ice over the Antarctica continent. At some point the growing mass will rupture the crust (the crust can only deform into the relative spherical-ness of the mantle so far) yielding a massive magma release. Then the “lost” water is liberated, the Great Lakes refill, etc.
Of course the rupture eventually closes up. Antarctica ice will build again, etc.
Just another long geological cycle people are mistaking for something else. Possibly because the continents will move and disrupt the pattern before a full and complete cycle occurs, but still…
” milodonharlani says:
August 31, 2013 at 3:33 pm
gbaikie says:
August 31, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Some CACA scare mongers have suggested that rising sea levels, supposedly due to man-made GHGs, could trigger earthquakes & tsunamis as a result of the greater weight of water over depressed, thin oceanic crust.”
And adding some CO2 to atmosphere could cause some warming.
But we aren’t going to have a 10 meter rise in sea level in next 1000 year.
And we had 100 meter rise in sea level in last 10,000 years.
So unless you imagine cavemen affecting climate [some do], it seems
more likely the 100 meter rise caused by Mother Nature has been and is triggering
such things as the possible earthquakes & tsunamis. And the human influence is some
number near zero.
It seems because humans have divided the world [with words] between Man vs Nature,
that as a consequence some suppose humans are unnatural and alien to this world.
Which is quite strange considering most who tend to do this, are atheists. And broadly speaking believe in relativism.
My wish is that people would understand what they actually believe in.
Know thy self.
Everybody is entitled to their view, but what is it with earth science/climate variation where anybody can write a “scientific hypothesis”? Richard Guy has no formal training in geology or geophysics, and it shows.
Not only does he not understand the historical and current theories on geological climate, glaciation and isostasy, but he also rejects plate tectonics.
A far better explanation of his “evidence” of stranded ports around the globe is the Holocene sea level maximum of 2-3m above present levels, at about 4-5,000 BC. Much simpler!
If you want people to read something, put it at the top.
Anthony Watts wrote,
… Instead what happened is many people never read past the first few paragraphs, completely missed my caveat …
After six paragraphs, it was clear to this reader that this was no more than a poorly written series of assertions and that reading further would be a waste of time.
Anthony Watts insulted his readers while demonstrating how challenging clear writing can be when he typed,
… I moved my original caveat up to the the top, and placed a second new one at the bottom for the reading challenged.
I doubt that the reading challenged will see the “second new one at the bottom” which was placed there for them.
Isn`t this just the new scare, ” Waterchange” , the last one is losing legs, so we better reduce water usage ASAP and they will help us with some nice new tax`s.
claimsguy says:
August 31, 2013 at 3:29 pm
> Does posting bad science get more clicks?
No, but it does get more comments.
From my USENET days I noticed that the more complete and accurate a post was, the fewer comments it would get. If there were mistakes that people could fix, there would be lots of comments.
“With all due respect, I submit that the above article is below the high standards achieved by WUWT.”
Not wanting to be rude to Anthony by putting words in his mouth, but I think you misunderstand what this (and other reputable climate realist blogs) are about. The idea is not to do peer review, but to let ideas be seen and their merit revealed by the free and fearless discussion in the comments. Personally, I never judge an idea by whether we “all know” it to be ludicrous – I give it a chance. This one made claims without evidence, so my default stance remains unmodified. Perhaps the author will come back with more evidence next time.
By demonstrating to me that new ideas (but stopping short of invisible pink unicorns) can be seen and considered, this article, IMHO, adds to the high standards of WUWT, even if the article is below the standards of other articles.
Hehe, see what happens when you leave the /SARC tag off!
This is clearly a joke essay probably for submission at a warmie site to attempt to get them to agree with him before turning the tables and coming clean. The clue is the incessant repetition in the body of the post. His name also is a giveaway – Richard Guy, aka Dick … Dick Guy, really!
The fact that he goes straight for the Great Lakes area is also telling. Recall from Wikipedia …
The continents are floating on the mantle, which is viscous enough so as to let them drift around the Earth at their leisure, crashing into each and building mountains and changing water currents. Naturally if you take a huge chunk of that water like say 120 meters of sea level and deposit it on land in the polar regions the continents at those locations will sink deeper into the mantle.
The only way it could be more obvious that this is a joke piece is if he denied Continental Drift itself. Perhaps he will have a Part II.
Speed wrote:
No, he insulted those readers who posted replies without bothering to read what they were criticising, and they deserve to be insulted.