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Chapter 18 - Ice Ages and Sea Level

Quaternary Environmental Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2025

Peter Copeland
Affiliation:
University of Houston
Janok P. Bhattacharya
Affiliation:
McMaster University, Ontario
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Summary

Ice ages and sea-level changes have occurred throughout the history of our planet, and both processes have left a clear signature in the rock record. In Chapter 8 we reviewed the history of the idea that Earth was largely frozen, including key evidence of global Neoproterozoic glaciations, referred to as the snowball Earth. In this chapter we begin with a focus on the more recent glaciations that mark the Pleistocene Epoch and the relationship between climate and sea level. We then examine the evidence for sea-level change as recorded in the organization of stratigraphic layers and changes in environments of deposition, emphasizing observations from the rock record, to show that sea levels have also varied, with remarkable periodicity, throughout Earth history and that they record the complex interaction of tectonics and climate.

Type
Chapter
Information
Earth History
Stories of Our Geological Past
, pp. 354 - 375
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Further Reading and References

Haq, B. U., Hardenbol, J. A. N., and Vail, P. R., 1987, Chronology of fluctuating sea levels since the Triassic, Science, 235(4793), 11561167.Google ScholarPubMed
Haq, B. U., and Schutter, S. R., 2008, A chronology of Paleozoic sea-level changes, Science, 322(5898), 6468.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, K. G., Lombardi, C. J., Browning, J. V., et al., 2018, Back to basics of sequence stratigraphy: Early Miocene and Mid-cretaceous examples from the New Jersey Paleoshelf, Journal of Sedimentary Research, 88(1), 148176, https://doi.org/10.2110/jsr.2017.73.Google Scholar
Payton, C. E., 1977, Seismic Stratigraphy—Applications to Hydrocarbon Exploration, American Association of Petroleum Geologists.Google Scholar
Raymo, M. E., and Lisiecki, L. E., 2005, A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ18O records, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, 20(1), https://doi.org/10.1029/2004PA001071.Google Scholar
Sloss, L. L., 1991, The tectonic factor in sea level change: A countervailing view, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 96(B4), 66096617, https://doi.org/10.1029/90jb00840.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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