Ice Age Sea Level Change: Lessons From Studies of the Mid-Pliocene Climate Optimum, the Last Glacial Maximum and the 20th Century.
Abstract
Renewed interest in geophysical models of ice age sea-level change has been motivated by three factors. First, the theory underlying these models has been progressively improved to take into account more complex viscoelastic Earth models and processes such as shoreline migration, changes in the extent of grounded marine-based ice sectors, and the impact on sea level of contemporaneous perturbations in the Earth's rotation. Second, results generated from these state-of-the-art models have highlighted the important information inherent to the geographic variability of sea-level change - information that is lost in analyses that are based on global (i.e., eustatic) averages. Third, there has been growing appreciation, through the application of the geophysical models, that accurate analyses of ancient sea level data sets can help to inform our understanding of future ice sheet stability in a warming world. In this talk we begin by summarizing a series of recent improvements in post-glacial sea-level theory and describe several applications that highlight important pitfalls in any effort to map sea-level measurements into estimates of past ice volumes. These applications include, in particular, studies of sea-level records from the mid-Pliocene climate optimum and the Last Glacial Maximum. We end by discussing an ongoing effort to use the geographic variability of rates obtained from tide gauge data and satellite altimetry records to estimate the dominant contributors to modern sea-level change.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFMGC54B..01M
- Keywords:
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- 0726 CRYOSPHERE / Ice sheets;
- 1223 GEODESY AND GRAVITY / Ocean/Earth/atmosphere/hydrosphere/cryosphere interactions;
- 4556 OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL / Sea level: variations and mean;
- 4926 PALEOCEANOGRAPHY / Glacial