By Alton Parrish (Reporter)
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A microatoll near Belitung Island in Indonesia.

“This research is a very important piece of work that illustrates the potential rates of sea-level rise that can happen from natural variability alone,” says Horton, professor of marine and coastal sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “If a similar oscillation were to occur in East and Southeast Asia in the next two centuries, it could impact tens of millions of people and associated ecosystems.”

Meltzner, a senior research fellow at the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, along with Horton, Kopp and their co-authors, used coral microatolls to understand when, and by how much, the sea level had risen and fallen near the Indonesian island of Belitung, which lies between Sumatra and Borneo. A microatoll is a circular coral colony, typically no more than about 20 feet across, in which the topmost coral is dead and the bottom part living and growing. By taking samples from microatolls in different places, scientists can date rises and falls of sea level.

The microatolls are what scientists call a “proxy” – a natural process that provides a reliable record of past events. “In any region, you try to find the proxy controlled by sea level,” Horton says. “In New Jersey, we have no corals, so we use salt marshes. In the tropics, corals are the go-to proxy.”

The scientists studied microatolls at two sites on opposite sides of the island. Meltzner says they didn’t expect the fluctuations they found because those changes in sea level contradicted what they knew about sea level in Southeast Asia. “Our conventional understanding of ocean circulation and ice-melting history told us that such fluctuations should not occur, so we were a bit mystified at the results from our first site,” Meltzner says. “But after finding a similar pattern at a second site 80 kilometers to the southeast, and ruling out other plausible explanations, it was clear that the coral growth patterns must reflect regional changes in sea level. There would be way too many coincidences otherwise.”

Aron Meltzner, a scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, working on a microatoll during an earlier research expedition.
 

Photo: Imam Suprihanto

The paper comes out of a long-running research project aimed at understanding the physical processes involved in sea-level rise. Such understanding, Kopp says, is necessary to help scientists understand the present and likely future state of the ocean. “This is a basic science problem,” Kopp says. “It’s about understanding past changes. Understanding what drove those changes is what allows us to test the climate models we use to predict future changes.”

In addition to Meltzner, Horton, Kopp, and Ashe, the authors are Adam Switzer, Qiang Qiu, Emma Hill, and Jedrzej Majewski, also of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore; David Hill of Oregon State University, Sarah Bradley of Utrecht University and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands; and Danny Natawidjaja and Bambang Suwargadi of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

Contacts and sources: 

Ken Branson

Rutgers University

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