Present‐day post‐glacial sea level change far from the Late Pleistocene ice sheets: Implications for recent analyses of tide gauge records

Abstract

We examine the sensitivity of predictions of the present‐day rate of sea level change due to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) in two regions located within the ‘far‐field’ of the Late Pleistocene ice sheets (Europe/north Africa and the western Pacific/Caribbean) to variations in the mantle viscosity profile. The regions considered here encompass the location of 11 (of 21) sites used in a recent determination, based on GIA‐corrected tide gauge records, of the global rate of secular sea level change. Our analysis suggests that the mean GIA correction at the 11 far‐field sites may vary by as much as 0.5 mm/yr, depending on the adopted Earth model, and we derive a bound on the (residual) secular sea level rise of 1.1 to 1.6 mm/yr. This bound is consistent with our analysis of the tide gauge record from the U.S. east coast, and it suggests that previous estimates of the residual sea level rise represent an upper bound.