NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Bohai Sea 135KYr Relative Sea Level Reconstruction

Future anthropogenic sea-level rise and its impact on coastal regions
is an important issue facing human civilizations. Due to the short
nature of the instrumental record of sea-level change, development
of proxies for sea-level change prior to the advent of instrumental
records is essential to reconstruct long-term background sea-level
changes on local, regional and global scales. Here, we employ numerical
methods to partition sediment grain size using a combined database
of marine surface and core samples, and to quantitatively reconstruct
sea-level variation since the late Pleistocene in the south Bohai Sea,
China. Our sea-level reconstruction indicates that relative sea-level
changes in the southern Bohai Sea track global sea-level variation
for the duration of the record. The results also indicate substantial
regression from 70 to 30 cal kyr BP, and potentially subarial exposure
from 38 to 20 cal kyr BP. Our results document the feasibility of
reconstructing relative sea-level change by numerical partitioning
of sediment grain size data, demonstrating the potential for future
applications.