Climate change is the one to blame for most detrimental shifts happening these days in the environment. However, there were also changes brought alone by time which included the sea-level change in the coasts in Southeast Asia which dates back to almost 6,000 years ago.
According to the official release of Rutgers University, its professors Benjamin Horton and Robert Kopp alongside a doctorate student Erica Ashe found out that the sea levels in the Southeast Asian region have been fluctuating in a wild manner in the past 6,000 years. Specifically, the said observation was noticed in the Belitung Island in Indonesia where the sea level rose twice from 6,850 to 6,500 years ago.
In the interview for Rutgers University, Horton revealed that this key finding from their study is just alarming. He further added that this sea-level rise happened when there was no climate change, what more if it will happen today when there's already obvious effects of climate change. Horton also emphasized that if the said sea-level change reoccurs, it can definitely affect millions of people especially those living in coastal areas.
In their article entitled "Half-metre sea-level fluctuations on centennial timescales from mid-Holocene corals of Southeast Asia" published in Nature Communications, Aron Meltzner, the lead author of Horton, Kopp, and Ashe's paper, shared that their team made use of microatolls. These microatolls are actually a colony of corals which helped their team to determine the time and length of sea-level changes in Belitung.
Meltzner admitted that they were actually surprised when they first saw the results.He then added that with their background with oceans and even ice-melts, they knew that a fluctuation like that in Belitung should not occur. Thankfully, their team had another set up in another location in Belitung which also had the same result that later on verified their findings.
Their team which is also composed of Adam Switzer, Qiang Qiu, David Hill, Sarah Bradley, Emma Hill, Jędrzej Majewski, Danny Natawidjaja, and Bambang Suwargadi, just wanted to highlight the need for more consciousness and awareness of the past happenings in our environment. Kopp also emphasized that history truly repeats itself and it's a must that the people are knowledgeable of what shall happen.
