Relatively clean snow and ice in the Indus River Basin during the COVID-19 pandemic may have reduced meltwater in 2020, compared with the 20-year average.
Image credit: Pixabay/Abdullah_Shakoor.
Edited* by Anny Cazenave, Center National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Toulouse Cedex 9, France, and approved March 25, 2011 (received for review October 29, 2010)
Abstract
We present new sea-level reconstructions for the past 2100 y based on salt-marsh sedimentary sequences from the US Atlantic coast. The data from North Carolina reveal four phases of persistent sea-level change after correction for glacial isostatic adjustment. Sea level was stable from at least BC 100 until AD 950. Sea level then increased for 400 y at a rate of 0.6 mm/y, followed by a further period of stable, or slightly falling, sea level that persisted until the late 19th century. Since then, sea level has risen at an average rate of 2.1 mm/y, representing the steepest century-scale increase of the past two millennia. This rate was initiated between AD 1865 and 1892. Using an extended semiempirical modeling approach, we show that these sea-level changes are consistent with global temperature for at least the past millennium.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bphorton{at}sas.upenn.edu.
Author contributions: A.C.K., B.P.H., J.P.D., M.V., and S.R. designed research; A.C.K., B.P.H., J.P.D., M.V., and S.R. performed research; A.C.K. and M.V. prepared figures; A.C.K., B.P.H., J.P.D., M.E.M., M.V., and S.R. analyzed data; and B.P.H., M.V., and S.R. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
*This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1015619108/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia
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