Links between climate and sea levels for the past three million years

Kurt Lambeck, Tezer M. Esat and Emma-Kate Potter
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Kurt Lambeck: Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
Tezer M. Esat: Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
Emma-Kate Potter: Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University

Nature, 2002, vol. 419, issue 6903, 199-206

Abstract: Abstract The oscillations between glacial and interglacial climate conditions over the past three million years have been characterized by a transfer of immense amounts of water between two of its largest reservoirs on Earth — the ice sheets and the oceans. Since the latest of these oscillations, the Last Glacial Maximum (between about 30,000 and 19,000 years ago), ∼50 million cubic kilometres of ice has melted from the land-based ice sheets, raising global sea level by ∼130 metres. Such rapid changes in sea level are part of a complex pattern of interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets and solid earth, all of which have different response timescales. The trigger for the sea-level fluctuations most probably lies with changes in insolation, caused by astronomical forcing, but internal feedback cycles complicate the simple model of causes and effects.

Date: 2002
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DOI: 10.1038/nature01089

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