Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Ship of Fools expedition leader Chris Turney shares more of his climate wisdom.
Australia’s coastal living is at risk from sea level rise, but it’s happened before
January 16, 2018 6.06am AEDT
With global sea levels expected to rise by up to a metre by 2100 we can learn much from archaeology about how people coped in the past with changes in sea level.
In a study published this week in Quaternary Science Reviews, we looked at how changes in sea level affected different parts of Australia and the impact on people living around the coast.
The study casts new light on how people adapt to rising sea levels of the scale projected to happen in our near future.
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A shrinking landmass
With the onset of the massive inundation after the end of the last ice age people evacuated the coasts causing markedly increased population densities across Australia (from around 1 person for every 355 square km 20,000 years ago, to 1 person every 147 square km 10,000 years ago).
Rising sea levels had such a profound impact on societies that Aboriginal oral histories from around the length of the Australian coastline preserve details of coastal flooding and the migration of populations.
We argue that this squeezing of people into a landmass 22% smaller – into inland areas that were already occupied – required people to adopt new social, settlement and subsistence strategies. This may have been an important element in the development of the complex geographical and religious landscape that European explorers observed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Following the stabilisation of the sea level after 8,000 years ago, we start to see the onset of intensive technological investment and manipulation of the landscape (such as fish traps and landscape burning).
We also see the formation of territories (evident by marking of place through rock art) that continues to propagate up until the present time. All signs of more people trying to survive in less space.
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In today’s world with substantially higher population densities, managing the relocation of people inland and outside Australia, potentially across national boundaries, may provide to be one of the great social challenges of the 21st century.
The abstract of the study;
Sea-level change and demography during the last glacial termination and early Holocene across the Australian continent
Alan N. Williams, Sean Ulmc, Tom Sapienza, Stephen Lewise, Chris S.M. Turneya
Future changes in sea-level are projected to have significant environmental and social impacts, but we have limited understanding of comparable rates of change in the past. Using comprehensive palaeoenvironmental and archaeological datasets, we report the first quantitative model of the timing, spatial extent and pace of sea-level change in the Sahul region between 35-8 ka, and explore its effects on hunter-gatherer populations. Results show that the continental landmass (excluding New Guinea) increased to 9.80 million km2 during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), before a reduction of 2.12 million km2 (or ∼21.6%) to the early Holocene (8 ka). Almost 90% of this inundation occurs during and immediately following Meltwater Pulse (MWP) 1a between 14.6 and 8 ka. The location of coastlines changed on average by 139 km between the LGM and early Holocene, with some areas >300 km, and at a rate of up to 23.7 m per year (∼0.6 km land lost every 25-year generation). Spatially, inundation was highly variable, with greatest impacts across the northern half of Australia, while large parts of the east, south and west coastal margins were relatively unaffected. Hunter-gatherer populations remained low throughout (<30,000), but following MWP1a, increasing archaeological use of the landscape, comparable to a four-fold increase in populations, and indicative of large-scale migration away from inundated regions (notably the Bass Strait) are evident. Increasing population density resulting from MWP1a (from 1/655 km2 to 1/71 km2) may be implicated in the development of large and complex societies later in the Holocene. Our data support the hypothesis that late Pleistocene coastal populations were low, with use of coastal resources embedded in broad-ranging foraging strategies, and which would have been severely disrupted in some regions and at some time periods by sea-level change outpacing tolerances of mangals and other near-shore ecological communities.
Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379117305267
What can I say? Even in as talented a field as the study of Climate Science, Chris Turney is kindof special.
In 2016, Chris Turney explained to us that Antarctic penguins are incapable of dealing with adverse ice conditions.
Now Turney has shown us that climate change and sea level rise created overcrowding which drove Australian Aboriginals to burn large tracts of their homeland.
One can only speculate what Turney’s next climate insight will be.
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“…evident by marking of place through rock art … All signs of more people trying to survive in less space.”
Nope, its just graffiti. Kilroy was here.
“In 2013 Chris Turney demonstrated by example that if pack ice is closing in on your ship, you shouldn’t hang around.
In 2016, Chris Turney explained to us that Antarctic penguins are incapable of dealing with adverse ice conditions.”
I guess Chris Turney decided that if he and several others on his team are incapable of dealing with adverse ice conditions, the penguins couldn’t either.
Here we have another grand fantasy from the renowned Polar Explorer Professor Turkey. He expects global sea levels to rise by up to one metre by 2100, so the waters had better get a move on as they have only gone up 10-centimetres since 1840 in Sydney harbour, according to the rock founded tide gauges. Bob Carter should have some amusing and enlightening comments on this latest from Professor Turkey.
You will need a Ouija board since the honourable Bob passed on 19 January 2016.
They sure are getting desperate to ‘prove’ things.
“Following the stabilisation of the sea level after 8,000 years ago, we start to see the onset of intensive technological investment and manipulation of the landscape (such as fish traps and landscape burning).”
Talk about selective tunnel vision! Burning to manage land and resources was part of hunter-gatherer cultures everywhere in the world where there was flammable vegetation and pragmatic reasons to do so.
Are these ‘experts’ completely ignorant or simply dishonest?
Aboriginal people in Australia did NOT torch the landscape in random or uncontrolled fashion. They carefully managed the ecosystem, and fire was CAREFULLY used as part of their sophisticated eco-management. Aboriginal people were practising agriculture, aquaculture and astronomy tens of thousands of years before the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Bablyonians, or the Europeans. Aboriginal people had farms, houses, tools, irrigation and trade. That has ALL be written out of the history books, much to the shame of everyone concerned. Whoever suggests that Aboriginals torched the landscape because of sea level rises, is totally ignorant of both science and history.
The best evidence for agriculture is the practice of leaving some of a yam in the place it was found. Evidence of aquiculture is found only in one place in Aus and academics who have no bias find it thin. The idea that the use if fire wasn’t random except for some understanding of the immediate dangers is fantasy.
If that is true, then the extinction of the megafauna was a deliberate act and not an accident. Causing extinction events is now part of “sophisticated eco-management”?
And please don’t extrapolate so much. “Some” Aboriginal people were practising these things, most were not. Domestic able crops and animals didn’t really exist here.
‘Aboriginal people in Australia did NOT torch the landscape in random or uncontrolled fashion.’ Neither do the farmers in Yuma, AZ.
You don’t have to spend much time in south-Eastern Australia in the height of summer, to realise that late-spring burning is a defence-mechanism.
Imagine living in a landscape that is an endless expanse of flammable material, on a scorching day, knowing that there are no firefighters , no refuge areas and no method of “getting out of Dodge” quicker than your own two feet.
Plus there are the obvious advantages to those for whom dinner means finding small animals that hide more easily in thick undergrowth, safety means being able to see snakes before you step on them, and comfort means not having your pubic tassel full of speagrass seeds.
Yes, there are other benefits to properly timed burning, but let’s not ignore the obvious. You have to be alive to enjoy them.
Ships of fools…
One thing that really bothers me is the mefia who allow persons who have no professional or any certification(s) in the sciences, the air time or editorial time to espouse their opinions on global warming.
Would they let a non medical person write or give air time regarding medical sciences? You can bet you bee-hind they wouldn’t.
Therefore: I will become a witch doctor and use that excuse to go on CNN and write articles for The Boston Globe to tout my newest cure for obesity, cancer, diabetes and lumbago….Cheese burgers, fries and a coke. Gotta throw in cigarettes and alcohol too…. shhh. Don’t tell them that!
Skill and honesty are not the same thing.
people do the same thing in eastern Indonesia today, because of the seasonal very dry conditions every year from April to October, they burn the ground to promote re-growth…..and these islands are rugged and not getting smaller.
“Tending The Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. California’s lushest landscape was able to support up to 1.5 people per square mile on the rich coast of the Santa Barbara channel, and 1 person per 12.5 sq. miles in the desert regions”
Apparently, Aboriginal Australians found 10 times that put pressure on them to do the unthinkable and start fires destroying the environment. The irony here is that one of the people to popularise the idea that fire burning by incoming Aborigines around 40 – 60 k years ago drastically altered the landscape is Tim Flannery.
“With global sea levels expected to rise by up to a metre by 2100 we can learn much from archaeology about how people coped in the past with changes in sea level.”
Chris Turney.
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There were two episodes during the later stages of the last ice age where sea level increased by 30 to 40 feet, overnight. Lakes of water formed on top of the 2 mile thick ice sheet covering North America over a period of 5,000 years. The boundary holding this water broke & the water cascaded at 1,000 mph into the ocean.
Chris Turney is worried about 1 meter in 100 years???
So, climate warmed and total poputation rose. Has the penny dropped yet?
Al Gore to speak at Hillary’s alma mater.
https://theswellesleyreport.com/2018/01/former-vice-president-al-gore-to-speak-at-wellesley-college-on-april-25/
Austrialia is ~7,700,000 Km^2. 1 person per 147 Km^2 would mean a total population of about 50,000. To a first approximation that is empty. Note that the estimated aboriginal population at the time of European Settlement is between 320 and 750 thousand.
Talk about Ozploitation!
This toilet paper has got to go down in history as the finest example of political talking points parading as science, ever written.
It is so dumb it’s not even wrong!
For a start, at the time humans arrived, Australia’s inland was covered by vast mega lakes – the remains of the Eromanga Sea:
*
http://i67.tinypic.com/dyrb6t.jpg
The point is, humans arrived at a time of lowering sea level when the inland was a drying sea. From that time to the present date the inland extent actually expanded while sea levels slowly rose, enough to inundate the shallow land bridge but not the – below sea level – basins of the outback!
*
http://i68.tinypic.com/28k4wzq.jpg
Talk about natural climate variation, Lake Eyre fills only intermittently today:
It is interesting to note:
“To the surprise of the early mariners who explored Australia’s coastline none of them discovered the mouth of any great river. Consequently, explorers including Flinders, Banks, Oxley, Sturt and King, all assumed that rivers flowing inland from the Great Dividing Range must flow towards an Inland Sea (Flannery 1998, 226; Johnson 2001, 21).”
They never found the Sea but a huge body of water still exists today, not on the surface but hidden beneath: The Great Artesian Basin.
http://i65.tinypic.com/2m4eqfm.png
“The basin occupies roughly the same area as the Eromanga Sea, the major portion of the water flowing slowly underground from the Great Dividing Range in north Queensland towards South Australia.”
*”Species-specific responses of Late Quaternary megafauna to climate and humans”: Nature 479, 359–364 (17 November 2011) doi:10.1038/nature10574
My goodness. That is surpassingly weird. I have thought that if there is any use for “renewable energy”, it would be a few places like Australia. Solar panels and wind turbines could desalinate sea water and pump it inland. Other locations where that technology could be worthwhile are Chile, Israel, North Africa, and Namibia.
Not sure exactly what you mean but there have been plenty of papers and talks of the feasibility of piping water inland and or damming the lakes – lake Eyre is 15m below sea level (Presumably affecting the flow of the Murray** river which would be problematic though! 😉 The bore water is utilised and geothermal has been mooted.
“In 1929 Dr John Bradfield, the engineer who built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, proposed a scheme to turn back the Tully River in north Queensland with a view to improving the flow in the Burdekin River and so permanently fill Lake Eyre with fresh water through the Diamantina River. The scheme became known as the Bradfield Scheme and has been furiously debated since then–particularly during the great droughts caused by El Nino. Almost all the rare major floods occur in La Nina years. The original Bradfield Scheme did not include the possible filling of Lake Eyre from the sea but today this possibility is also sometimes referred to as his scheme. The idea of filling Lake Eyre from the sea was raised in the South Australian parliament as early as 1883 but rejected on the grounds that it would take vast amounts of money to dig a 350 km canal.”
[“Australia’s enigmatic inland sea..” The Free Library. 2012 Australian and New Zealand Map Society, Inc. 16 Jan. 2018 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Australia%27s+enigmatic+inland+sea.-a0294901331%5D
**”In 1830, after enduring extreme hardship, Charles Sturt discovered the mouth of Australia’s largest river, the Murray, but fourteen years later he was still searching in vain for the Inland Sea (Australian Encyclopaedia 1979, 5:464; Bonython 1971, 1).”
Accessible online article summary : Drying inland seas probably helped kill Australia’s megafauna
I’m not making the megafauna extinction argument (by pointing to this link) I’m just demonstrating the absurdity of Turney’s lack of knowledge, regarding reality! To be clear, the contraction of the mega-lakes from the earliest date – a time of plenty – would be a far more significant source of “marginalisation” than the smaller changes due to the rising sea levels at the coast. according to multiple studies of the history, reconstructed by diverse disciplines!
I refer everyone to the published works of Prof Bainbridge, the world’s most famous climatologist for decades, who passed away not so long ago at the age of 96. He noted that during the past 3000 years sea level on the E Coast of Australia was as much as 2m higher than at present, and showed photos of old coastlines to support his opinion. A similar set of beaches can be seen in E Ireland.
After sea levels ‘stabilised’ a few thousand years before ‘Rome and Greece’ they dropped. Will the Ship of Fools sail into those already charted factual waters? I wonder.
There is nothing as meek as a warning that sea level will rise a metre, to a position a metre below where it used to be. The horror!
The ‘immigration, fleeing, crowding’ thing is nothing more than climate jingoism. If he thinks a miserable metre of sea level rise will cause the collapse of civilisation he should build an ark and get busy collecting marsupials.
“With the onset of the massive inundation after the end of the last ice age, people evacuated the coasts causing markedly increased population densities across Australia…”
Apparently, an ice age is preferable to an increase in sea level. I wonder what the aboriginals from that time period would say about that if we could ask them. Clearly, life must have been better after it got warmer because their population increased quite a bit despite a smaller habitat. But if sea levels and temperatures back then can rise so much through natural means, why is it they cannot be affected today by natural means but only by man-made CO2?
Much tree, hard to hunt. Much bushes, hard to hunt. Much grass, hard to hunt.
Much burn, easy to hunt.
There is little hard evidence that oral histories are remembered for more than a handful of generations in a society that does not record events in writing. Rock art is sparse, has dating difficulties and relies on modern interpretations for some of its tales.
The majority of Australian fires of large area are most likely to be caused by lightning. Their impacts can be seen on aerial imaging for some decades with enough history to eliminate arson.
The archaeological industry in Australia is imaginative. I have witnessed the schooling of locals by University experts in the 1970s and 1980s when concepts perviously alien, like some stories relating religion to land ownership, were force fed to some locals in northern Australia.
It is.shameful to see this bending of minds for personal profit. Geoff
You don’t have to spend much time in south-Eastern Australia in the height of summer, to realise that late-spring burning is a defence-mechanism.
Imagine living in a landscape that is an endless expanse of flammable material, on a scorching day, knowing that there are no firefighters , no refuge areas and no method of “getting out of Dodge” quicker than your own two feet.
It does not take much intelligence to work out that burning when conditions are more benign, enhances survival
Plus there are the obvious advantages to those for whom dinner means finding small animals that hide more easily in thick undergrowth, safety means being able to see snakes before you step on them, and comfort means not having your pubic tassel full of speargrass seeds.
“from around 1 person for every 355 square km 20,000 years ago, to 1 person every 147 square km 10,000 years ago”
Wow, imagine the “crowding” that must have caused. I wonder if Mr. Turney has any idea just how big a square kilometre is. And that transformation supposedly occurred over a 10,000 year period, so the sense of haste and crowding must have been very…… slow and, in practical terms, unnoticeable.
The odd thing is that increasing population and “resource intensification” is a world-wide phenomenon during the Late Glacial and Early Holocene. It occurs both along coasts and inland, and there is an extensive literature dealing with the phenomenon.
Google “intensification” + “paleolithic” or “broad spectrum revolution”
And at the same time as the poor crowded aborigines started torching the landscapes the inhabitants of the other half of Sahul, i e New Guinea, solved their resource problem by independently inventing agriculture.
However this didn’t happen along the coast where the purported catastrophe was going on. No, it happened in the Eastern Highlands, 6000 feet above sea-level and as far from the sea as you can get in New Guinea. It didn’t spread to the coast either. People there didn’t really need it. Tropical coasts are resource-rich.
This is total bollocks from a completely (but infinitely) proud idiot speaking way outside his expertise.
The aborigines have never been short of land. The land was never very productive. So some communities developed agri / aqua cultural practices.
In Tasmania fire farming was an established practice (you can still see the evident remains of this today) in order to encourage grasslands on which Kangas and Wallabies would feed, and then supply an abundant food supply. The first white settlers in Tasmania survived for this reason, in contrast to the close to extinct settlers in Port Jackson.
This man is an idiot commenting way beyond his pay grade.
Squeezing one poor soul into 147 km2 or even 71 km2 – with a neighbor to the left, right, front and behind; one ought’a have spoken out more clearly against sea-level rise.
Well, there you go: they adapted. People with technology no more advanced than the stone axe adapted. But WE won’t – we’ll just die like flies according to the hysterics. Jesus wept…
Turney is a second rate academic from Kenso Tech.
You would not get away with this stuff at Sydney University.