ZMT - Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung

Sea-level changes through the Holocene have been geographically variable. Knowledge of the spatial and temporal interplay between the dominant drivers of Holocene sea-level changes in the tropics is essential to understand past ice sheet dynamics, constrain Earth parameters in glacial isostatic adjustment models and evaluate anthropogenic influences.

This project contributes to the understanding of the dominant drivers of Holocene / Anthropocene sea-level changes in Indonesia, an archipelago that is highly vulnerable to future sea-level rise. We will determine the rate of early Holocene sea-level rise based on coral reef drill cores from the Spermonde Archipelago, Sulawesi. Results will be compared to glacial isostatic adjustment simulations in order to detect at which point in time isostatic contributions became the dominant driver of sea-level rise.

This project will furthermore validate existing mid-Holocene sea-level reconstructions for southwest Sulawesi through a thorough field evaluation of the origins of the used sea-level indicators. These results will be used to put precise constraints on the regional Earth model parameters and to provide a reliable isostatic background signal to the ongoing anthropogenic contributions. Lastly, this project will /provide the first sea-level record for the late Holocene Anthropocene in Southeast Asia, based on floating chronologies from slabbed microatolls.

This unique record will be used to evaluate the sea-level variability in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool during the Little Ice Age and the 20th century global warming.