Warnings of a rising sea.

 Extrapolations  My oldest granddaughter was born in 2015.

Washington Post

Ancient warning of a rising sea

Sarah Kaplan

Nov. 17 at 6:00 a.m.

“If oceans rose like that again, Dutton said, it would be devastating for small island nations like the Seychelles.”

Because that means it’s not just going to be gradual,” she said. “It could be like, whoop, there goes a whole half a meter all at once.”

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“It tells of a time 125,000 years ago, when a modest increase in Earth’s temperatures caused ice sheets to melt and global sea levels to surge.

The height of the coral — which can grow only underwater — marks where the ocean once reached, and where it could someday rise again.

Sarah Kaplan and Bonnie Jo Mount traveled to four islands of the Seychelles and a geochemistry lab in Madison, Wisc. to document how fossil corals are helping scientists predict future sea level rise….

That pattern suggested that the waters around the Seychelles rose, fell and then spiked back up several times — with each spike raising sea levels even higher than they were before. If plotted on a graph, the changing height of the ocean would look less like a smooth diagonal line than a broken staircase for giants, climbing upward in short, dramatic surges.

The dating methods Dutton’s team used allowed them to pinpoint the timing of these pulses to within a 500-year span. But details in the fossil reef’s structure suggested that some of the spikes in sea level may have happened even faster than that, within the 100- to 200-year life span of a single coral...

"And at Anse Source D’Argent — the scenic beach where Dutton found her first fossils — acres of soft white sand have been washed away by the steadily rising tide. The water seeps under walls that are supposed to contain it and scrapes earth from beneath the roots of the shading takamaka trees.

Just a few feet away, a chunk of ancient coral looms over the eroded beach path. Like many La Digue residents, Ernesta grew up hearing about the history the fossils represented and the warnings for the future they held.

'It’s very emotional for me to know that where we are standing now, everything was underwater,” Ernesta says. “Maybe now, the planet is taking it back.'

Michael Quatre, senior engineering technician for the Seychelles Meteorological Authority, unlocks the shed on the island of Mahé that houses the Seychelles' only tide gauge. The instrument has already detected sea levels rising at twice the global average rate."