http://www.earthscape.org/r3/cronin/cronin08.html

• Main Author: Owner
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Hicks; Nils; Smith Island
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1078.1526; http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/Cronin.pdf

Principles of Paleoclimatology: Perspectives in Paleobiology and Earth History, by Thomas M. Cronin 8. Sea-Level Change . . . in speculating on catastrophes by water, we certainly anticipate great floods in the future, and we may, therefore presume that they have happened again and again in past times. Sir Charles Lyell, 1830. By Land or By Sea? For centuries Scandinavian naturalists have noted a remarkable phenomenon-their country's land area was increasing and their coasts were rising. Skerries were becoming islands, waterways were closed, and submerged forests were rising. Nils-Axel Morner of Sweden (1979a) describes how in 1743, Anders Celsius, inventor of the thermometer and famed for his temperature scale, calculated a rate of coastal rise (or relative sea-level fall) of 1.2 cm/yr along Swedish coasts. The rising land gave considerable support to the eighteenth-century theory of Neptunism, which held that sea level was continuously falling in a one-way direction. Indeed, this trend of falling sea level continues today in Scandinavia at a rate of 1-2 cm/yr. On Smith Island, located in the heart of Chesapeake Bay, the opposite has been happening. When English colonists settled in the seventeenth century, Smith Island was ideal for grazing cattle, and bay waters off its shores were bountiful with finfish and shellfish. Over the past three centuries, however, its coasts, like those of other Chesapeake Bay islands, have suffered from severe erosion and shoreline retreat. Smith Island has been reduced in area from 11,000 acres in 1849 and to 7000 acres of mostly marshland by the 1980s. Tide gauges, first established in the Chesapeake and its tributaries in Baltimore (1903), Annapolis (1929), and Solomon (1938), Maryland, as well as Washington, D.C. (1931), record vertical coastal submergence at rates between 3.17 and 3.56 mm/yr (Hicks and Hickman 1988; Emery and Aubrey 1991). In a century, this amounts to more than a 30-cm sea-level rise relative to the land surface. Coasts along Chesapeake Bay are retreating in ...