For the Instructor

These student materials complement the Coastal Processes, Hazards and Society Instructor Materials. If you would like your students to have access to the student materials, we suggest you either point them at the Student Version which omits the framing pages with information designed for faculty (and this box). Or you can download these pages in several formats that you can include in your course website or local Learning Managment System. Learn more about using, modifying, and sharing InTeGrate teaching materials.

Humans and Sea Level Change Over the Last 11,000 Years

What about the most recent period of sea level change (i.e., during the Holocene) since humans have been involved?

Once again, given the Hansen data (Figure 4.24), the time period for most significant human impact on climate is shown within the last few 1000 years. Major human industrial activities became prominent only within the last few centuries, but human influences on the natural environment go back 1000s of years. As we discussed previously, ice core, sediments, tree rings, coral growth patterns, and other proxy data sets have proven to be great resources for exploring recent and more historic climate change in time scales of just seasons to several hundred thousand years. Ice layers are especially revealing. Given that we know that glacial ice builds a layer every season, glacial ice layers trap the chemical signatures of the atmosphere and record any of the major global events that happened in that year (i.e., use of new chemicals by humans, volcanic eruptions, large scale fires, etc.). This provides glaciologists and other climate scientists an excellent record to evaluate how climate changes on an increment-by-increment, or layer-by-layer basis. In addition, instrumental measurements have further added to our ability to measure temperatures as well as sea level positions. Careful evaluation of these data sets, in comparison to proxy data sets have allowed scientists the ability to produce a robust conciliatory record that helps us understand more explicitly the ways in which human or anthropogenic activity is contributing to the changes we are now measuring and experiencing.