Can sea level rise and fall in lightening speed?

Geologists believe that about 80,000 years ago something very strange happened. Earth's last ice age was starting and sea levels were dropping for thousands of years as more and more water was getting trapped in expanding glaciers and then suddenly rose, according to their study. The researchers have not yet found the cause of this strange theory, but they do believe that the findings will make others rethinking about the mechanisms that are governing Earth's climate.

For the last thousands of years Earth's climate have followed a pretty stable climate pattern, but about every 100,000 years kilometer-thick ice sheets form on top of the northernmost parts of North America, Asia and Europe, and extend into mid-latitudes. These ice sheets tie up seawater that can make the oceans drop over 100 meters. After the drop about 90,000 years later the glaciers will retreat and the land will reappears, until the next ice age. The last ice age happened about 11,000 years ago. The researches are going back a century ago are attempting to find the cause of the ice-age cycle. They have found several reasons including periodic changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun and the shake in the planet's axis rotation, these both seem to be factors in the cycle, but the researchers are not positive in the definite answer.

The researchers have studies coastal caves on the Spanish Island Mallorca in the Mediterranean sea, they studied the stalactites that were encrusted with calcite. The researchers evaluated the measures of the encrustations, which they marked the high and low water levels. they then dated the deposits using a radioactive decay of traces of uranium into thorium isotopes. These calculations found that the sea level 80,000 years ago had rebounded to the point where the level rose 1 meter higher than it is present day, and that it could/can rise quiet quickly as much as 2 meters per century. These stalactites in the caves were discovered in 1970, but the geologists did not have the technology to date the accurately, but with today's technology they were able to use the uranium-thorium ratio for an accurate measurement.

These recent findings show persuasive evidence of a surge in sea level about 80,000 years ago. Other geologists also suggest rising sea levels 80,000 years ago but not as much of a change. The geologists still have more studies to come, this is just the beginning of their research about the sea-level variations, during the ice-ages. Check it out! The picture is of the stalactites found in the cave, that geologists measured and studied.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/211/3