Probabilistic assessment of sea level during the last interglacial stage

By Robert E Kopp, Frederik J. Simons, J. Mitrovica, A. Maloof, M. Oppenheimer. Nature, 2009

664 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With polar temperatures ∼3–5 °C warmer than today, the last interglacial stage (∼125 kyr ago) serves as a partial analogue for 1–2 °C global warming scenarios. Geological records from several sites indicate that local sea levels during the last interglacial were higher than today, but because local sea levels differ from global sea level, accurately reconstructing past global sea level requires an integrated analysis of globally distributed data sets. Here we present an extensive compilation of local sea level indicators and a statistical approach for estimating global sea level, local sea levels, ice sheet volumes and their associated uncertainties. We find a 95% probability that global sea level peaked at least 6.6 m higher than today during the last interglacial; it is likely (67% probability) to have exceeded 8.0 m but is unlikely (33% probability) to have exceeded 9.4 m. When global sea level was close to its current level (≥-10 m), the millennial average rate of global sea level rise is very likely to have exceeded 5.6 m kyr-1 but is unlikely to have exceeded 9.2 m kyr-1. Our analysis extends previous last interglacial sea level studies by integrating literature observations within a probabilistic framework that accounts for the physics of sea level change. The results highlight the long-term vulnerability of ice sheets to even relatively low levels of sustained global warming.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Earth-Surface Processes, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e351f57181553608ce709506b13483c1002df06

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Citations in the corpus

A new glacial isostatic adjustment model for Antarctica: calibrated and tested using observations of relative sea‐level change and present‐day uplift rates (2012, background): “…high (5 × 1021 Pa s), upper mantle viscosity for the whole of Antarctica, but such earth models would be unable to reproduce the RSL observations, and are incompatible with independent estimates of upper mantle viscosities for continental regions (Lambeck & Chappell 2001; Mitrovica & Forte 2004).”
Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods (2015, result): “above present (61, 62), in agreement with site-”
Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise (2016, neutral): “The combination of Pliocene and LIG sea level targets is ideal, because Pliocene retreat is dominated by processes associated with (2) and (3), while the LIG is dominated by process (1).”
Tipping elements and climate–economic shocks: Pathways toward integrated assessment (2016, background): “…Interglacial period suggests that the committed response to 2∘C global warming above pre-Industrial era temperatures may be about 6–9 m of GMSL rise [Kopp et al., 2009], but if these 6–9 m were to take millennia to be realized, humans and ecosystems might readily adapt to them at minimal cost—in…”
Glacial isostatic adjustment modelling: historical perspectives, recent advances, and future directions (2018, methodology): “Combining GIA modelling with a probabilistic approach, Kopp et al. (2009) find that global ice volumes during the Last Interglacial (~125 ka) were at least 6.6 m smaller than present (95% probably; magnitude expressed as sea-level equivalent), but uncertainty associated with the interpretation…”
Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core (2013, neutral): “…location of the Greenland ice sheet cannot constrain the overall ice sheet changes during the last interglacial period, the NEEM data can only be reconciled with Greenland ice sheet simulations 30 that point to a modest contribution (2 m) to the observed 4-8 m Eemian sea level high stand 44,45 .”