The last ice ageĪt the height of the last ice age some 21,000 years ago, not only were the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets larger than they are today, but three-kilometre-high ice sheets covered large parts of North America and northern Europe. While there are excellent online resources to model the local physical impacts of sea level rise, the recent geological past can provide important insights into how humans responded to dramatic increases in sea level. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global sea levels may increase by more than eight millimetres per year, four times the average of the last century.Ī major challenge for managing such a large increase in sea level is our limited understanding of what impact this scale of change might have on humanity. More than eight out of every 10 Australians live within 50 kilometres of the coast. The study casts new light on how people adapt to rising sea levels of the scale projected to happen in our near future. In a study published this week in Quaternary Science Reviews, we looked at how changes in sea level affected different parts of Australia and the impact on people living around the coast. With global sea levels expected to rise by up to a metre by 2100, we can learn much from archaeology about how people coped in the past with changes in sea level.
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