Sea levels: resolution and uncertainty

This year saw the publication of two major works in the fields of climate and environmental change. The first, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), provides the latest scientific consensus regarding sea-level changes in the recent past and near future (IPCC, 2007). The second, the Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science (Elias, 2007), is probably the most significant collective work on Quaternary Science to date (Piotrowski, 2007). It contains several chapters relating to longer-term sea-level changes (10-10 years), the sources of data used to reconstruct them, and some of the important controlling variables (Cooper, 2007; Edwards, 2007; Gehrels, 2007; Horton, 2007; Milne & Shennan, 2007; Murray-Wallace, 2007a,b; Nelson, 2007; O’Cofaigh & Bentley, 2007; Pirazzoli, 2007; Shennan, 2007; Woodroffe, 2007; Zong, 2007). The AR4 notes that this longer-term perspective is essential to assess the significance of recent changes and the processes involved (Jansen et al., 2007). This report briefly reviews the AR4 sea level summary and projections for future change. It then considers the development of high-resolution records of relative sea-level (RSL) change which have the potential to bridge the gap between instrumental data and longer geologically based reconstructions.