gg Eemien Nederland

Eemian Sea Levels
Warm period ~124 thousand years ago
Illustration Frank Wesselingh, Naturalis


During the warmest part of the Eemian sea levels were at least 6 m higher then at present, while the average world temperature was only about 1 to 2 °C higher with respect to the middle of the nineteenth century. That conclusion was reached by a group of American scientist from Princeton and Harvard in 2009 after having analysed the world wide locally measured sea levels of that warm period taking into account the self-gravitation effects of the iceplates on those local sea levels. In addition their reconstructed coastlines can be found in Nature 462, 863-867 (2009):
"Probabilistic assessment of sea level during the last interglacial stage".

Recently (2013) the Dutch specialists of the "Big Ice" of the "Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research Utrecht" (IMAU) published a analysis of the fate of the Greenland iceplate during the Eemian. The main conclusion of the article ("Coupled regional climate-ice-sheet simulation shows limited Greenland ice loss during the Eemian") is: The Greenland iceplate can have contributed at most 2 m to the sea level rise of the bigger than 6 m rise of that period and therefore the contribution of the Antarctic iceplate must have been more than 4 m equivalent.

The article from Utrecht strenghtens the conclusion of the Nature publication:

"The results highlight the long-term vulnerability of ice sheets to even relatively low levels of sustained global warming."

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