Reconstructing late Holocene relative sea‐level changes at the Magdalen Islands (Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada) using multi‐proxy analyses

Proxy records of late Holocene relative sea‐level changes are important for our understanding of mechanisms that drive contemporary sea‐level trends. In the Gulf of Saint Lawrence (eastern Canada), the Magdalen Islands currently experience higher than global average rates of relative sea‐level rise. This article presents original reconstruction data of sea‐level changes from the Magdalen Islands over the past few millennia collected from a variety of coastal deposits and proxy records including salt‐marsh foraminifera, testate amoebae and plant macrofossils. Reconstructed late Holocene relative sea‐level trends are between 1.3 and 2.0 mm a −1 for the past 2000 years. When combined with contemporaneous trends in tide‐gauge data from Cap‐aux‐Meules (Magdalen Islands), multi‐proxy data show acceleration in the rate of relative sea‐level rise to over 4 mm a −1 during the 20th century. This signal corresponds to similar inflexions also registered in salt marshes and tide‐gauge data along the east coast of North America.