By Kenneth Richard on 23. August 2021
A new study suggests British Columbia (Canada) relative sea levels remained 10 meters higher than they are today until they fell to their present levels in the last ~1800 years. Two other new studies suggest sea levels were still 0.8 to 1 meter higher than today during the Medieval Warm Period.
After the peak of the last glacial about 20,000 years ago, relative sea levels subsequently rose from 120 meters below modern sea levels to heights of 90 meters above today’s by ~14,500 years ago in the Douglas Channel near British Columbia, Canada (Letham et al., 2021).
Sea levels proceeded to fall 75 to 80 meters over the next 3000 years, or about -2.5 meters per century (-25 mm/yr), and then they remained 10-15 m above present for the next ~9000 years.
“We determine that central Douglas Channel was ice-free following the Last Glacial Maximum by ∼14,500 BP and RSL was at least 90 m higher than today. Isostatic rebound caused RSL to fall to 21 m asl by 11,500 BP, though there may have been a glacial re-advance that would have paused RSL fall around the beginning of the Younger Dryas. RSL fell to 10–15 m asl by 10,000 BP, and continued to drop at a slower rate towards its current position, which it reached by ∼1800 years ago.”
Image Source: Letham et al., 2021
Steffen et al., 2020 proposed relative sea levels peaked at 32 meters above today’s levels in Nanotalik (southern Greenland) during the latter stages of the last ice age (13,800 years ago).
Image Source: Steffen et al., 2020
Sea levels were reportedly about 40 meters higher than today 15,000 years ago along the coasts of western Norway (Bondevik et al., 2019).
Image Source: Bondevik et al., 2019
For the Southern Hemisphere, a 2011 study (Watcham et al.) reported Antarctica’s sea levels were at least 15 meters above today’s 9000 years ago. Falling sea levels have been ongoing since then, with an especially pronounced acceleration in declining sea levels in the last 500 years.
Image Source: Watcham et al., 2011
Two more new studies indicate the relative sea levels along the coasts of Bangladesh (Haque and Hoyanagi, 2021) and South China Sea (Yan et al., 2021) were still about 0.8 to 1.2 meters higher than today’s during the Medieval Warm Period.
None of these studies have sea level trajectories that even remotely align with changes in the atmospheric CO2 concentration that ranged from 230 ppm 14,500 years ago to 270 ppm during the Medieval Warm Period.
The IPCC / UN / China don’t wish to discuss facts or history of climate .
They know the world climate is changing and warming and their convenient reason for that is to blame CO2 emissions caused by western civilisation .
Politics is far more powerful than science .
“…After the peak of the last glacial about 20,000 years ago, relative sea levels subsequently rose from 120 meters below modern sea levels to heights of 90 meters above today’s…..”
We know it rose about 100 meters because the continental shelf used to be beach and delta, but the Holocene high stand is generally not accepted to be 90 meters above todays level.
Tangential, but interesting sea level story. A news story about a recent study trying to account for the “Great Discontinuity.”
It may have been caused by an event where the entire planet was covered with glaciers.
And I am dumb if I believe the entire planet could be covered with water.
“The Great Unconformity is dramatically exposed at the Grand Canyon, but it has been identified in rock layers in other parts of the world. As a result, scientists have suggested that this weird memory lapse may have been caused by an erosive event that spanned the globe, such as the worldwide glaciation associated with the ‘Snowball Earth’ period some 700 million years ago.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvzk8q/why-one-billion-years-of-time-are-missing-in-the-grand-canyon