By Kenneth Richard on 6. May 2024
Human footprints embedded into rock that used to be a sand beach at the limit of the seashore’s “swash flow” and high tide lie 20 to 30 meters above the present sea level. The footprints are dated to ~90,000 years ago.
It is estimated that sea levels were globally about 6 to 9 meters higher than today during the last interglacial (~130,000 to 115,000 years ago), when CO2 supposedly peaked at 275 ppm (Sommers et al., 2022).
Image Source: Sommers et al., 2022
Evidence along the coasts of North Africa (Morocco) suggests sea levels were “20 m above the present level” about 95,000 years ago (MIS 5c).
This is consistent with a new study that reports human footprints embedded and preserved in a rocky beach “20 to 30 m above sea level” can be dated to 90.3 ±7.6 thousand years ago.
The water limit, or shoreline, very likely reached this elevation at that time, as the requisite conditions for “salt-crusting,” the preservation of footprints, involve a location at “the landward limits of the spring high tidal zone” and at the “limits of swash flow”.
Image Source: Sedrati et al., 2024
Interestingly, this same Moroccan region’s shoreline has, in recent decades, been stable to advancing seaward at a rate of +0.89 m per year (Amara Zenati et al., 2024). This is inconsistent with the viewpoint that sea level rise is poised to flood the Earth’s coasts and shrink her shorelines.
Image Source: Amara Zenati et al., 2024
And coastal expansion isn’t just a local phenomenon. Globally, shorelines have been advancing seaward at a rate of +0.26 m per year since the 1980s, as, despite sea level rise, the “global coastline is prograding” (Mao et al., 2021).
Image Source: Mao et al., 2021
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Sea level higher or land lower?
I was in western Newfoundland land a few years ago. There are old fjords, now freshwater lakes isolated from the sea. There’s a remnant delta conglomerate on one side of a river. The sea/land cobtact were clearly lower before than now.
I have also been in Dubai, about 10 km inland from the Arabian Gulf, where I saw remnant Beach dumes some 1.5 m above the current Gulf. 3,000 years ago the Gulf extended some 14 km further inland. On a university field trip, we were shown wavecuts in outcrop kilometers from the current Atlantic Ocean in Florida. I bogged down my F150 in beach gravel some 3m higher than the current Hudson Bay.
I could go on. The shorelines of the northern world have been higher and lower than present in even the recent pass. I comment on the Newfoundland fjords especially as we know the sea-level was some 400′ lower at the end of the last gladiator 12,000 years ago: Newfoundland has clearly risen by more than 400′, while Hudson Bay/Churchill has obviously done the same.
Unless we understand the general as well as local isostatic uplift, individual sea level changes are meaningless regarding Climate Change assertions or reputations.
P.S. Don’t get stuck in any beach gravels outside Churchill. The 500m hike back through active polar bear territory still gives me the shivers.
Just be pleased it was not 500 m stroll through areas of Chicago, LA or even Washington DC. In comparison I suspect the polar bears would be safer.
Plus at least 50 additional cities, purposely mismanaged by Democrats, and the student riots at our “institutes of higher learning”, where color and plagiarisms gets you promoted to President, as part of being woke.
Jefferson, an outstanding person, former US President, must be spinning in his grave
Answer: both.
In some places the sea level is lower and the land is higher, so the answer is: everything.
The problem is that tectonic changes and isostatic uplift plus coastal erosions and accretion totally make nonsense of ‘the only thing that affects the land sea boundary is sea level rise’
Sea level rise? Or coastal erosion?
This report is another Reality Check, at 275 ppm atmospheric CO2, sea level was 10 to 30 meters higher than current during the last inter-glacial cycle of the Ice Age we live in. There are comments about observations of sea level rise or decline versus land movements, and such issues are common in Sequence Stratigraphy, which utilizes six orders of cycles affecting sea levels and resulting sedimentary deposition. The evidence is clear: there is no anthropogenic signal detectable in sea levels, not now, not ever.
At 90 thousand years ago, the Earth had been well underway in the last glaciation, which reached its peak at approx. 27 thousand YA. The northwest coast of what is now Morrocco is many hundreds of miles south of the maximum extent of the glaciers that covered much of northern Eurasia.
So the rocks in which these footprints were found could not have been affected much, if any at all, by any surficial subsidence caused by glacial advance, nor surficial rebound following the retreat of the last glaciers. Nor is there any no known vulcanism in this area either that would cause surficial uplift.
So this information certainly appears to fully contradict if not discredit the “rising CO2 causes sea level rise” that is so dominant in warmunist theology.
The coldest time of the last glaciation was about 27000 years ago
Water levels were about 120 meters lower than now
Then a warming began, which increased the world temp from about 5 C about 27000 years ago to about 18 C about 15000 years ago
The temp was about 14.8 C in 1900 and about 16 C in 2023
We have been in an increasingly worse CO2 drought for at least 10 million years
Burning fossil fuels is good, because it adds to CO2 ppm
There’s nothing particularly startling about this claim. In some areas of the British Isles – the Somerset Levels or Romney Marsh, to name but two – where the coast used to be, now some way inland, is clearly visible and the flat, low-lying areas now adjacent to the sea were obviously once sea-bed.
Sea-level falls, sea-level rises – not much you can do about it…
Yet people panic over a 2mm rise per year- as if they have nothing else to worry about. It’s certainly not on my list of top 100 things to worry about.
BUT Obama’s houses on Martha’s Vineyard and in Hawaii are seaside and we must STOP the rise to suit him, don’t ya know??
Because the Vineyard is about to be drowned by the sea- the authorities refused to allow that planeload of illegals that DeSantis offered to them – and sent them to a military base on the Cape.
Oh! That’s why.
Plus too many illegals would tip it over, like Guam. Just ask Georgia House rep Hank Johnson.
No, he really bought those properties so he could display the devastating results of the coming sea level rise, to help his fans understand the crisis.
Other than those who like the crease in his pants, who are his fans?
perhaps because you are not being paid, via grants, academic position, etc., for worrying
Exactly. This is simply another finding in the mountain of evidence of sea levels that were several meters higher around 100k years ago during the prior interglacial warm period. The popular pet theory that CO2 is the primary cause of sea level rise can’t explain it. Of course the whole CO2-warming-sea-level-rise theory was simply a pretext to befuddle the gullible in order to accomplish the command-and-control agenda of the leftists of the world.
Everywhere in the world you can point out where the ocean shore used to be and where it is now. How many Roman era coastal towns along the Med are now under water or now kilometers inland? Here in North Carolina we have an area called the sandhills (which includes Pinehurst) that is 100 miles from the Atlantic. Where did all the sand come from? It used to be a beach.
Therefore, one might claim the sandhills of Nebraska were once a beach on the Great Inland Sea?
Yes they were. Just as the top of the Rockies was at seafloor level as shown by the fossil seashells I find at 10K’.
Serious question: Could receding glaciers leave those seashells at those heights, as they receded, or is that a dumb question?
I do not remember the time frame, but there was an era when the Caribbean Ocean extended to Montana. Jurassic I think. Triassic I believe it went to Colorado.
At one point in time, it extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean.
Sea levels were higher about 130000 yrs ago in the Indian Ocean.
Morocco is in a seismic active region. Every few decades a whopping great earthquake. Shifts both horizontally and vertically. How do we know how to take vertical movements into account when determining sea level 90000 ago, with who knows how many earthquakes in between?
Accretion, “the process of growth or increase, typically by the gradual accumulation of additional layers or matter”, the growth seaward of beaches along shorelines has little or nothing to do with sea level rise or fall. It does have a lot to do with along-shore currents, topography of the near-shore ocean bottom, winds, and other factors.
Accretion is often very local, sometimes regional. My favorite example is of a small beach on the north shore of the Dominican Republic (near Sosúa) that could gain five vertical feet of sand overnight and then lose it again the next night. Entirely dependent on wind direction which drove very local currents.
The U.S. east coast is learning a lot about beach erosion and beach accretion…with Federally funded sand replenishment efforts. They pump sand onto a eroded beach, only to have that sand move down or up the beach to where it wasn’t “needed”.
We are kidding ourselves about sea level rise. We adjust for the weight of glaciers that existed 20,000 years ago. That adjustment is applied to a relatively small area of the planet in the amount of mm per decade. Yet we have no idea at mm. accuracy of how much the bottom of the ocean has risen or fallen over 80% of the planet, undersea and under ice. We have made measurements of the rate of continental drift. We are parties to high order scientific hubris.
DMac ==> quite right this: “high order scientific hubris.”…I call it “computational hubris”.
Or pseudo-scientific political hubris. Something in there fits anyway.
I do not think this article is reliable. Even if the stated facts are true, the implied conclusions aren’t. I spent some time researching before posting, so will explain.
The Eemian highstand is estimated to have occurred about 124kya. It is estimated to have been about 6-7 meters higher than present sea level. NOT 20+ meters. Not 90kya.
Morocco sits at the overthrust boundary of the African and Eurasian plates, so highly geologically unstable. The big killer earthquake of Sept. 2023 (Richter 6.8) produced a land upthrust of 15 cm. The previous big earthquake was in 1960, so about 60 years ago. (I ignore the more frequent lesser Moroccan earthquakes.) 90000 year ago beach footprints 20+ meters above present sea level just means about [(90000/60)*.15 meter upthrust] 22.5 meters of overthrust vertical land rise over that period on average.
Plate tectonics, not climate change, explains the finding. Tricky NoTricksZone.
The 1960 quake laid waste to a place called Agadir. It put Morocco on the map for the Dutch because of the ‘guest workers’, Moroccans who had come to a Europe with pressing labour shortages and had their origins in the affected area.
So … footprints.
Does that mean Man caused the sea level rise or reversed it?
Each step pressured the earth down, and each sucking withdrawn step drew it up…
“A line in the sand” doesn’t seem to mean all that was once thought.
Hasn’t meant much since o’bummer said it.
I’ve read that 4 to 5k ya, natives could stand on land 80 miles further east than the current coast of Georgia. As one approaches the “ledge” off the current coast of GA, the water is 100 – 200 feet deep. So earth has been warming for thousands of years since ice sheets in NH began to melt. Climate changes. Deal with it.