Credit: University of South Florida
TAMPA, Fla. (January 22, 2021)- The pressing concern posed by rising sea levels has created a critical need for scientists to precisely predict how quickly the oceans will rise in coming centuries. To gain insight into future ice sheet stability and sea-level rise, new research from an international team led by University of South Florida geoscientists is drawing on evidence from past interglacial periods when Earth s climate was warmer than today.
Using deposits in the caves of the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, known as phreatic overgrowths on speleothems, to reconstruct past sea level stands, the team was able to determine that the vertical extent of these unique deposits corresponds with the amplitude of the fluctuating water table, said author USF geosciences Professor Bogdan Onac. That determination now is providing scientists with a way to precisely measure past sea levels.
, by investigating samples that are either older or younger than the Pliocene epoch (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago). Using precisely dated cave deposits from several of the Mallorcan caves and applying numerical and statistical models to estimate the corrections for glacial isostatic adjustment and long‐term uplift, they translated the local sea level estimates into global mean sea level (GMSL).
Their results show that during key time events, such as Pliocene–Pleistocene Transition, some 2.6 million years ago, the GMSL stood at 6.4 meters (some 10 meters lower than the warmer Pliocene), whereas during the beginning and the end of the Mid‐Pleistocene Transition the sea level was at −1.1 meter and 5 meters respectively.
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