The researchers theorize that if the sheet melts, it will have the seemingly contradictory effect of lowering sea levels nearby, actually stabilizing the sheet.
Now, however, Harvard researchers have a rare bit of what passes for good news on the global warming front: If the West Antarctic ice sheet melts, it will have the seemingly contradictory effect of lowering sea levels nearby, actually stabilizing the sheet.
The Black Sea became a semi-enclosed marginal sea, similar to the Bonaparte Gulf, during lowering sea levels (Bahr et al. 2005), and reconnected to the Mediterranean Sea at ~9000 years ago in association with rising sea level (Soulet et al. 2011).
The occurrence of these fishes in the Sunda Islands probably resulted from lowering sea levels during the Pleistocene glacial era, that reached levels 120 m below present, and fishes could travel into the Sunda Islands without moving beyond the sea [72].
Major subdivisions of the Permian Period are identified by extended periods of lowered sea level and by major faunal change.
This lowered sea level, coupled with the closure of narrow seaways probably due to plate movements, isolated the Mediterranean Sea.
As the storm moved over the Avalon Peninsula, it lowered sea level nearshore as observed at St . Johns by the tide gauge (Fig. 3a).
We note the strong probability that many coastal landscapes exposed at lowered sea level provided relatively fertile and productive refugia for plants, land mammals and humans at a time when increased aridity would have reduced or deterred hinterland occupation.
Coastlines elevated by isostatic and tectonic processes, or with very steep offshore drop-offs at plate boundaries, are important in providing a potential window into coastal landscapes and archaeology formed during periods of lowered sea level.
Fig. 5 Map of the southeast Asian and Australian regions combined showing a bathymetry having lowered sea level by 120 m, so as to show what the periphery of the landmasses would have looked like at the LGM.
