A 5700-year-old beach-ridge set at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and its implication for Holocene sea-level history in the southeastern USA

The Holocene ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 095968362110499
Author(s):  
Kathleen Rodrigues ◽  
Frank W Stapor ◽  
William J Rink ◽  
James S Dunbar ◽  
Glen Doran
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
High Water ◽  
South Florida ◽  
Beach Ridge ◽  
Beach Ridges ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Depositional Age ◽  
Holocene Sea Level

The Cape Canaveral Peninsula is the largest Holocene coastal sand deposit composed of beach ridges on the Atlantic coast of Florida. It is composed of 16 beach-ridge sets that are separated by erosional surfaces. Despite its prominence as a Holocene coastal depocenter, there are a limited amount of chronological data constraining the timing of its formation. In this study, we apply optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating on sand-sized quartz and radiocarbon dating on individual marine shells to develop a refined chronology of the Cape Canaveral beach-ridge plain with particular focus on constraining the depositional age of the northwesterly-most, and geographically oldest, beach-ridge set on the peninsula. We obtain an average OSL age of 5680 ± 240 years ( n = 4) for the initiation of coastal deposition at Cape Canaveral. The new ages, and the organization of beach ridges into 16 distinct sets indicates that the Cape Canaveral beach-ridge plain experienced an ~5700-year history of alternating deposition and erosion, with 75% of present-day Cape Canaveral (Beach-ridge Sets 5–16) deposited over the past 2000 years and Beach-ridge Sets 8–16 comprising 50% of the area over the past 1000 years. Because the minimum swale elevations of the ~5700-year Beach-ridge Set 1, and those of all the younger beach-ridge sets, are within several decimeters of present-day mean higher high water, we hypothesize that all the beach ridges present at Cape Canaveral could have been deposited at or within decimeters of present-day sea level. There is no evidence for Holocene “highstand” events over the past 5700 years in the published sea level curves from northeast and south Florida, which are based on subsurface estuarine foraminifera/leaf litter and mangrove peat data, respectively. This dichotomy illustrates the need to integrate both subaerial and subsurface data to produce a more realistic Holocene sea-level curve for the southeastern United States.

Sea-level history of the past two interglacial periods: new evidence from U-series dating of reef corals from south Florida

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 570-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Muhs ◽  
Kathleen R. Simmons ◽  
R. Randall Schumann ◽  
Robert B. Halley
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
South Florida ◽  
Reef Corals ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Evidence

High Water, Low Water

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
Deep Ocean ◽  
High Water ◽  
Sea Level Changes ◽  
Flood Plains ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Sea Level ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Rock Strata

In almost everybody’s natural lifetime, the sea is one of the great unchanging certainties of life. There is land; there is sea; and in between is that magical place, the seaside, which is sometimes knocked about a bit by the waves, but always manages to recover for that next idyllic summer. There are, one remembers, those faintly disquieting legends, about a remarkably well-organized and ecologically aware person called Noah, and about a Deluge. But these, of course, should not be taken seriously. They were a jumpy and superstitious lot, our ancestors, always prone to making up scary stories. It was a good way to keep the children in order. With a longer perspective, things seem a little different. Take any one location on the globe, for instance. Track it over millions of years. At that one location, there may be a change from deep ocean, to shallow sea, to a shoreline, and thence to terrestrial swamps and flood plains. And then, perhaps, to the absence of evidence, a horizon of absolutely no thickness at all within a succession of rock strata, in which a million years or a hundred million years—or more—may be missing, entirely unrecorded. It is that phenomenon called an unconformity, all that is left of the history of a terrestrial landscape pushed up into the erosional realm. On that eroding landscape, there may have been episodes of battle, murder, and sudden death among armoured saurians, of fire, flood, and storm, and of the humdrum day-to-day life of the vast vegetarian dinosaurs, chewing through their daily hundredweights of plants. Of this, no trace can persist. Only when that landscape is plunged again towards sea level, and begins to be silted up, can a tangible geological record resume. The Earth’s crust, as we have seen, is malleable, can be pushed downwards or thrust upwards by the forces that drive the continents across the face of the globe. Many of the sea level changes that can be read in the strata of the archives are of this sort, and mark purely local ups and downs of individual sections of crust, with no evidence that global sea level was anything other than constant.

Coastal GIA processes revealed by the early to middle Holocene sea-level history of east China

2020 ◽  
Vol 233 ◽  
pp. 106249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haixian Xiong ◽  
Yongqiang Zong ◽  
Tanghua Li ◽  
Tengwen Long ◽  
Guangqing Huang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
East China ◽  
Middle Holocene ◽  
History Of ◽  
Holocene Sea Level

Sea-level driven acceleration in coastal forest retreat

Geology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (12) ◽  
pp. 1151-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathalie W. Schieder ◽  
Matthew L. Kirwan
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ecosystem Change ◽  
Coastal Forest ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dead Trees ◽  
Adult Trees ◽  
Primary Determinant ◽  
Global Sea Level

Abstract Ghost forests, consisting of dead trees adjacent to marshes, are a striking feature of low-lying coastal and estuarine landscapes, and they represent the migration of coastal ecosystems with relative sea-level rise (RSLR). Although ghost forests have been observed along many coastal margins, rates of ecosystem change and their dependence on RSLR remain poorly constrained. Here, we reconstructed forest retreat rates using sediment coring and historical imagery at five sites along the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States, a hotspot for accelerated RSLR. We found that the elevation of the marsh-forest boundary generally increased with RSLR over the past 2000 yr, and that retreat accelerated concurrently with the late 19th century acceleration in global sea level. Lateral retreat rates increased through time for most sampling intervals over the past 150 yr, and modern lateral retreat rates are 2 to 14 times faster than pre-industrial rates at all sites. Substantial deviations between RSLR and forest response are consistent with previous observations that episodic disturbance facilitates the mortality of adult trees. Nevertheless, our work suggests that RSLR is the primary determinant of coastal forest extent, and that ghost forests represent a direct and prominent visual indicator of climate change.

Holocene sea-level history of the Canadian Beaufort shelf

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip R. Hill ◽  
Arnaud Héquette ◽  
Marie-Hélène Ruz
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level Rise ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Coastal Zone ◽  
Marine Sediments ◽  
Tidal Marsh ◽  
Relative Sea Level ◽  
The Holocene ◽  
Single Piece ◽  
History Of ◽  
Holocene Sea Level

New radiocarbon ages pertaining to the Holocene sea-level history of the Canadian Beaufort shelf are presented. The ages were obtained on samples of freshwater and tidal-marsh peat beds from offshore boreholes and shallow cores in the coastal zone and on molluscs and a single piece of wood deposited in foraminifera-bearing marine sediments. Although none of the samples record directly the position of relative sea level, the suite of ages constrains the regional curve sufficiently to suggest a faster rate of mid Holocene sea level rise (7–14 mm/a) than previously thought. The rate of relative rise slowed markedly in the last 3000 years, approaching the present at a maximum probable rate of 2.5 mm/a.

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