Geotopics Seminar Series: Dr. Oana Dumitru, "Sea level reconstruction during past warm periods"
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Abstract:
Understanding how fast and how much sea level will rise in the future is a pressing concern. My research tackles this question by reconstructing sea level during past warm periods, which provide insight into the sensitivity of ice sheets to warming. In this seminar I will present results from two past warm periods: the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (~ 3.3 to 3.0 Ma) and The Last Interglacial (~129 to 116 ka). I use speleothems from littoral caves and fossil corals as sea level indicators, obtain precise ages using radiometric dating, and pair these field and laboratory results with geodynamic models to obtain estimates of past sea level and ice extent. I find that global mean sea level might have reached 16 m when the Earth was 2.5 to 4 °C warmer than today, and ~ 2 m above present levels when temperatures were higher by 0.5 to 1.5° C. These new sea level estimates will serve as input for numerical climate and sea-level models which will ultimately contribute to produce more reliable predictions on the future sea level rise.
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