Smooth or oscillating late Holocene sea-level curve? Evidence from the palaeo-zoology of fixed biological indicators in east Australia and beyond

Baker, R.; Haworth, Robert

doi:10.1016/s0025-3227(99)00118-8

Cited by 85 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…While generally stable from c.6,500 years ago, there was another sea level rise (between 1-2m in height) sometime between 4-3,000 BP (Baker and Haworth 2000). It has been argued that the marine coastal ecology probably did not stabilise until c.4,000 BP, meaning that shellfish and Chapter 2: the Sydney Basin-environmental context estuarine resources probably did not become important to coastal/estuarine inhabitants until this time (Callaghan 1980, White andO'Connell 1982).…”

Section: Climatic and Eustatic Changementioning

confidence: 96%

Dreamtime Superhighway (TA27) : Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange

McDonald¹

2008

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Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia -lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present. List of volumes in Terra AustralisVolume 1: Burrill Lake and Currarong: Coastal Sites in Southern New South Wales. R.J. Lampert (1971) Volume 2: Ol Tumbuna: Archaeological Excavations in the Eastern Central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. J.P. White (1972) Volume 3 vi Dreamtime Superhighway: an analysis of Sydney Basin rock art and prehistoric information exchange FOREWORD I remember the visit with clarity: it was 1991 and my first trip to Australia. One day was spent at Sydney's West Head with the young and enthusiastic Jo McDonald, where we toured some of the rock engraving sites and the painted Great Mackerel rock shelter. I can still see the large flat curving rocks at West Head on which animals had been engraved -fish, kangaroos, a goanna. And, as is so often the case when I visit rock art sites, my imagination gets going as to the 'how's' and 'why's'. I try to run some sort of a show in my head as to the people who produced these, viewed these, and what kinds of significations the images and their makings played in the lives of past peoples. At the time of this visit, Jo McDonald was well into her 1994 dissertationthe work upon which this monograph is based. Already, in that PhD dissertation, she was able to touch on some of the things that my imagination was searching for. Thus, it is with great pleasure and even more enthusiasm that I am writing this Foreword to a revised and thoroughly up-dated monograph based on that initial dissertation research.At the time of the 1994 dissertation, the anthropological and archaeological study of 'rock art' was really emerging into new trends and new prominence. Surely Australia was one of the leaders in the training of students and in the research that contextualized the images and 'art', thanks to such scholars as Andrée Rosenfeld, Robert Layton, and John Clegg among others. By this time, the work of David Lewis-Williams and colleagues in southern Africa had set off numerous studies world-wide into the relationship between the production of rock art images and altered states of consciousness and the role of shamans in image-making practices. But this was not the direction or focus of rock art studies in Australia, and McDonald's original work would not be tempted either. Rather, she carried out an extensive project of contextualizing the rock art in question, and in two different ways. First, she wanted to give us an understanding of the rock art in its archaeological contexts-sheltered or open, dates and chronologies, site types and, in general, what the archaeology c...

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Section: Climatic and Eustatic Changementioning

confidence: 96%

Dreamtime Superhighway (TA27) : Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange

McDonald¹

2008

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“…While it is generally accepted that relative sea level reached a maximum of 1-1.5 m above present mean sea level (pmsl) by ~7 ka (Lewis et al, 2013), interpretations of relative sea-level fall after the mid-Holocene highstand have varied and include: 1) a smoothly falling sea level to present (Chappell, 1983); 2) a highstand that remained until ~2 ka (Sloss et al, 2007) or 1.2 ka (Lewis et al, 2015) and then abruptly fell to present levels; and 3) an oscillating sea level, with meter scale fluctuations (Baker and Haworth, 2000, Lewis et al, 2008, Leonard et al, 2015. As reef growth is highly sensitive to variations in sea level (Woodroffe and Webster, 2014), a fall or possible oscillation in sea level should be reflected in the growth response of mid-outer platform…”

Section: Accepted M Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, it was postulated that a final rise in sea level occurred during this interval, before finally falling to present levels. However, this remains an issue of contention with multi-proxy data (e.g., microatolls, tubeworm-barnacles, reef flat cores) showing divergent sea-level trends within this region (Harris et al, 2015, Baker and Haworth, 2000.…”

Section: Accepted M Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Successive phases of Holocene reef flat development: Evidence from the mid- to outer Great Barrier Reef

Dechnik

Webster

Webb

et al. 2017

Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology

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A re-examination of 46 recently published U/Th reef flat ages from Heron and One Tree reefs in the southern Great Barrier Reef (GBR) identified several distinct Holocene reef growth phases with a clear 2.3-kyr hiatus in lateral reef accretion from 3.9 ka to 1.5 ka. An analysis of all available published radiocarbon reef flat ages (165) from 27 other mid-outer platform reefs revealed a similar hiatus between 3.6 ka and 1.6 ka for the northern, south-central and southern GBR. However, no hiatus in reef flat growth was observed in reefs from the central GBR with ages ranging from 7.6 ka to 0.9 ka. Increased upwelling, turbidity and cyclone activity in response to increased sea-surface temperature (SST's), precipitation and El-Nino Southern Oscillation variability have been ruled out as possible mechanisms of reef turn-off for the midouter platform reefs. Rather, a fall (~0.5 m) in relative sea level at 4-3.5 ka is the most likely explanation for why reefs in the northern and southern regions turned off during this time.Greater hydro-isostatic adjustment of the central GBR and long term subsidence of the HalifaxBasin may have provided greater vertical accommodation for the mid-outer reefs of the central GBR, thus allowing these reefs to continue to accrete vertically despite a fall in sea level ~4-3.5 ka. Further evidence for greater subsidence in this region includes the lack of senile reefs and dominance of incipient and juvenile reefs in the central GBR. This suggests that these reefs approached sea level considerably later than the northern and southern reefs, consistent with their deeper antecedent substrates. Thus, these results not only provide important information about possible reef flat demise in response to natural environmental factors, but also provide insights into regional subsidence that affected relative sea level along the east Australian margin during the Holocene.

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“…This region is characterized by a mid-Holocene highstand. Both smooth and oscillating sea-level trends have been recorded since the highstand [179,180]. This discrepancy in part reflects differences in the sea-level indicators used and their interpretation [178 ].…”

Section: Oceaniamentioning

confidence: 99%

Holocene Relative Sea-Level Changes from Near-, Intermediate-, and Far-Field Locations

Khan

Ashe

Shaw

et al. 2015

Curr Clim Change Rep

117

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Holocene relative sea-level (RSL) records exhibit spatial and temporal variability that arises mainly from the interaction of eustatic (land ice volume and thermal expansion) and isostatic (glacio-and hydro-) factors. We fit RSL histories from near-, intermediate-, and far-field locations with noisy-input Gaussian process models to assess rates of RSL change. Records from near-field regions (e.g., Antarctica, Greenland, Canada, Sweden, and Scotland) reveal a complex pattern of RSL fall from a maximum marine limit due to the net effect of eustatic sea-level rise and glacio-isostatic uplift with rates of RSL fall as great as −69±9 m/ka. Intermediatefield regions (e.g., mid-Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA, Netherlands, Southern France, St. Croix) display variable rates of RSL rise from the cumulative effect of eustatic and isostatic factors. Fast rates of RSL rise (up to 10±1 m/ka) are found in the early Holocene in regions near the center of forebulge collapse. Far-field RSL records exhibit a midHolocene highstand, the timing (between 8 and 4 ka) and magnitude (between <1 and 6 m) of which varies among South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania regions.

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Smooth or oscillating late Holocene sea-level curve? Evidence from the palaeo-zoology of fixed biological indicators in east Australia and beyond

Cited by 85 publications

References 23 publications

Dreamtime Superhighway (TA27) : Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange

Dreamtime Superhighway (TA27) : Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange

Successive phases of Holocene reef flat development: Evidence from the mid- to outer Great Barrier Reef

Holocene Relative Sea-Level Changes from Near-, Intermediate-, and Far-Field Locations

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