Abstract
Sea-level rise is a global problem, yet to forecast future changes, we must understand how and why relative sea level (RSL) varied in the past, on local to global scales. In East and Southeast Asia, details of Holocene RSL are poorly understood. Here we present two independent high-resolution RSL proxy records from Belitung Island on the Sunda Shelf. These records capture spatial variations in glacial isostatic adjustment and paleotidal range, yet both reveal a RSL history between 6850 and 6500 cal years BP that includes two 0.6 m fluctuations, with rates of RSL change reaching 13±4 mm per year (2σ). Observations along the south coast of China, although of a lower resolution, reveal fluctuations similar in amplitude and timing to those on the Sunda Shelf. The consistency of the Southeast Asian records, from sites 2,600 km apart, suggests that the records reflect regional changes in RSL that are unprecedented in modern times.
Highlights
Sea-level rise is a global problem, yet to forecast future changes, we must understand how and why relative sea level (RSL) varied in the past, on local to global scales
Many of the regions of high sea-level variability were areas of extraordinarily high rates of sea-level rise between 1993 and 2001, though those high rates have been shown to be biased by the aliasing of interannual and decadal variability into linear sea-level trends over the brief period of observation[3,4]
On the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, reconstructions of centennial scale Z0.3-m RSL fluctuations 5,500–5,100 years BP30, and 4,800–4,500 and 3,000–2,700 cal years BP31 suggest that oscillations may be more common than previously appreciated, in the tropics, but sufficiently high-resolution RSL proxy records are needed to identify them
Summary
Sea-level rise is a global problem, yet to forecast future changes, we must understand how and why relative sea level (RSL) varied in the past, on local to global scales. We derive proxy records of mid-Holocene RSL from coral microatolls at two sites on Belitung Island, Indonesia, on the Sunda Shelf: TBAT, in the southeast; and TKUB, 80 km to the northwest (Fig. 1; Supplementary Table 1).
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