I was out again yesterday, scrambling over the rocks below Boiling Pot Lookout in Noosa National Park. It is what biologists enjoying doing most, observing nature close up. All the better when you can sit-in your favourite marine pothole and see if the tide will eventually wash over you.
Waiting for sea level rise.
Before the moment of the highest tide, and before we had even made it around to the platform with the marine potholes, I found myself in the water, walking out to see where I had been just a few months earlier on the lowest tide for last year.
You might be inclined to think that we have sea level rise here in Noosa when you see these photographs, but it’s actually just a case of the time of year and the time of day. Because you see, the sea level is very affected by the sea tides.
The theory of the tides, and the maths used to calculate them accurately, was worked out by one man, Arthur Thomas Doodson, a profoundly deaf graduate of Liverpool university in the 1930s. So much good science was done back then when mathematicians, like Doodson, were encouraged to work from actual observations.
Yesterday, I specifically wanted to be at Tea Tree Bay for the highest tide of the year, scheduled for 9.33 am, Saturday 13th January 2024.
I always like to see how high the highest wave will crash against the platform with the wave cut notch – from a time of higher sea levels.
I am usually with my drone attempting to stay dry, but this year I left the drone behind and so I was at liberty to watched from a marine pothole.
The cliff face behind reaches up perhaps 30 metres to the famous Boiling Pot Lookout. There is a wave cut notch running right around the base of the cliff face – where the rock platform begins.
The cliff face has been formed by undercutting: from waves swirling beneath until they bring down great lumps of rock, to be removed by the wash. And so, the headland has receded landward, and the platform become wider. But it’s not happening anymore, because sea levels are not as high as they used to be.
Logically, sea levels must have once been much higher, because now, even on the highest tide for the year the waves don’t reach the bottom of the cliff face, the waves don’t reach to the notch. On highest tides long ago, the waves must have smashed against the cliff face.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Be ready to run away from rising oceans 🙂
Rising and boiling! 😆
Sea levels are not rising according to the recordings from Fort Dennison.
Fort Denison data ‘more accurate than satellite’ on sea levels | Sky News Australia
“There’s been really no change over all that time in terms of the amount of sand and the position of the beach,”
At Bengello Beach, longest-running coastal study in Southern Hemisphere finds ‘nature is the best healer’ – ABC News
But don’t forget about the dooming-
“We don’t yet see a very clear signal of sea level rise but my sense is that it’s going to appear in the next 50 years.“
Fort Denison (single ‘n’) tide data…
There is also data from the Bondi Baths surge pool, which basically the same as Fort Denison.
oh look. a red thumber with a data-hating disease… so funny.:-)
See the data here (more than one Fort Denison station but it covers a century of data)
https://psmsl.org/data/obtaining/stations/196.php
Global warming started 1995???
You can find evidence of Eemian sea levels in many places, and even earlier in the Holocene. Heck, the whole State of Florida used to be continental shelf, which you can tell because the soil there is basically nothing but sand (and thus the frequent sinkholes).
And limestone at greater depths.
Continental shelf you say?
US quietly grew nearly 400,000 square miles (msn.com)
I heard that, and they quickly assured us, “we won’t extract any resources from there!”.
So “we” are going to remain in power?
Rock platform on the NSW coast indicate a 1.5m – 2m higher sea level around 1500-2000 years ago.
I walked along the beach between Aberdovey and Tywyn in Wales on Saturday. Over Christmas I walked along Borth beach which is across the Avon Dyfi from Aberdovey. At low water on the beaches on both sides of the river you can see remains of an ancient forest (and some more recent peat cuttings), link below. Since the glaciers receded at the end of the last ice age (and left some impressive valleys inland) the sea levels have risen 300ft. We never hear the climatastrphists mention this.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/forest-of-borth
I’ve said this before …. I can still stand on the same rocks I fished from at high tide 65 years ago.
Story Tip
Serveral thousands of tractors and a lot of trucks are on the way from sevearl directions to Berlin, for the final demo tomorrow in the Gouvernements Quarter.
<a href=”https://i0.gmx.net/image/720/39062720%2cpd=2%2cf=responsive169-w1350/bauernproteste-berlin.webp”>Some hundrets arrived today in the afternoon.</a>
✊
And the mean tide level at Point Puer, Isle of the Dead, Port Arthur Tasmania, cut into the rock in 1841, is still visible today.
Also Fremantle in Western Australia is another long-duration tidal measuring site, with the first site recording in 1890. The current site, only a short distance away, still shows an average of only 1.7mm, or 0.07 inches, a year. Fremantle has a daily tide range of 700mm or 27.5 inches. And there is NO rate increase.
Despite all the wishful hopes of the climate botherers, there is a failure to accelerate. In fact, comparing the rate of change of high precision stations around Australia, the rate of change has decellerated for most stations in the two decades from Nov 2003 to Nov 2023 per attached. Data from here:
http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanography/projects/abslmp/reports.shtml
I expect this project to lose funding soon because it is showing the opposite of what was expected.
When sea level starts going down it will be time to get worried about all the port infrastructure in the Northwest that loads iron ore and is Australia’s largest source of income.
All the rain falling on Australia now is reminiscent of 2011 when the sea level fell for a while.
When the permafrost advances south again the sea level will fall. And it will fall for a very long time. I will be dust rather than a fossil.
With the amount of water coming down over Australia and the snow coming down in North America setting new records, you have to wonder when the climate botherers actually come to realise they have been scammed.
It is worth noting that these readings do not have compensation for land settlement.
And there is zero knowledge of how much 70% of the planet, the sea beds, have risen or fallen from one place to another….assuming the volume of the Earth’s magma is constant…if the sea beds should rise 3 mm, the continents must fall 7mm, and assuming ocean volume is constant, sea level must then be 7 mm higher relative to the continents…and since the continents are higher than sea level, they constantly push the sea beds higher by the laws of hydraulics on the magma underneath….OK speculative, have at me debunkers…
Were the atmospheric conditions – air pressure, onshore wind speed, etc. – the same as the previous year?
. . . and did Earth’s rotational speed increase or decrease, or perhaps Earth has moved farther away from the Sun.
When in danger or in doubt
Run in circles scream and shout
3 metres higher you say?
26443_Summary.pdf (environment.sa.gov.au)
and some pics-
Fitzgerald Bay (2024) All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (with Photos) (tripadvisor.com.au)
and that was after the geology of Hallett Cove showed the sea level rose 130 metres between 15000 and 6-7000 years ago creating said gulf. Yes aboriginals could walk on land from Adelaide to Edithburgh and well south of the rolling hills of present day Kangaroo Island to the foreshore where the Continental Shelf is nowadays.
Damn those aboriginal cooking fires and traditional burnoffs to flush out game or Tim Flannery’s Megafires killing the Megafauna-
Sparks fly in megafauna debate › News in Science (ABC Science)
Oh dear Tim don’t upset the nostalgic Green aborigine meme for the neo-hippies.
Three meters could true. Here is a. Picture of island near Zanzibar showing a large sea level drop over past 130,00 years.
Good observations by Dr. Jennifer. She should be an Honorary Geologist. Wave cut notch from higher sea level times it is.
Very nice.
We are not in a climate crisis, CO2 is not the control knob for our climate and we are not going to reach a tipping point and suffer irreversible global warming.
Off topic, Jennifer, but I sincerely hope that you slip, slop, slap to deal with that Qld sun.
I didn’t, and now about to start my 3rd and last treatment option for melanoma.
You don’t see or feel it coming, one day it’s just there, everywhere, and there\s no getting rid of it.
I think I’m just a bit older than you Jennifer, but you have decades of valuable science yet to do.
It would be a genuine loss to informed marine and climate science if your vocation had to curtailed.
I have to admire a Ph.D. scientist who goes out into the field and investigates, even underwater to view and photograph coral … rather than viewing coral from airplanes or helicopters, or with confuser games called models. Real science requires more than a computer, desk and a government grant to write scary predictions of climate doom that end up being 100% wrong.
I have to admire a Ph.D. scientist who goes out into the field and investigates…
Wash your mouth out with soap and repeat after me… the science is settled…the science is settled…
Vast Volcanic Superstructure Found Growing In The Pacific Ocean (msn.com)
Geology checking in … that’s not a wave cut. That little gap is a softer layer of rock which eroded faster than those above it. Did wind driven waves strike that cliff face and help erode the softer material? Yes.
I do like the ‘angular unconformity’ in the foreground though.
there is no softer layer of rock. if you watch the film you get a better idea of the extent of the notch, and how it is at the same height cutting around that ledge for at least 150 metres, into the same rock type.