Owen K. Mason

Minimal late Holocene sea level rise in the Chukchi Sea: arctic insensitivity to global change?

Long-term estimates of sea level rise are essential for planning responses to anthropogenic global change. The tectonically stable, unglaciated eastern Chukchi Sea coast has numerous depositional environments for extracting long-term records in the absence of tide gauge data. Radiocarbon ages (n=27) on paleo-marsh beds along several Seward Peninsula lagoons allows the reconstruction of sea level over the last 6000 years in northwest Alaska and indicate a modest sea level rise, 1.5 m, or 0.27 mm year 1 . Neoglacial (1600–200 cal BC) storm deposits from Kotzebue Sound to Barrow are 1–1.5 m below modern storm surge elevations, supporting the inference of a lower eustatic sea level. Our data-constrained sea level curve establishes that the Chukchi Sea responds at a considerably slower rate than other regions of the world, supporting recent models of isostatic response for the arctic. D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The periodicity of storm surges in the Bering Sea from 1898 to 1993, based on newspaper accounts

Spectral analysis of 96 yr of Bering Sea storm records reported in the Nome News (1899–1903) and Nome Nugget (1901–1993) newspapers indicate regularities in the 11-, 5–7- and 3-yr periods. Statistical tests on the 11-yr period found no statistically significant correlation with sunspot cyclicity despite a tendency toward maximum storminess during low sunspot periods. The 3- and 5–7-yr cycles may correlate with variability in the El Niño Southern Oscillation and easterly shifts in the mean position of North Pacific low pressure anomalies. Storm surges were infrequent from 1916 to 1928 and 1947 to 1959, while the most frequent and intense storms hit during 1900–1913, 1936–1946, 1974–1976 and in 1992.