Sea Level Through the Millennia: The Record from Coral Reefs

Coral reefs are sensitive recorders of past sea-level and environmental change. Their histories can be accurately dated by mass spectrometry to identify the chronology of events that accompanied sea-level change during the last several glacial cycles. With only small corrections, records derived from scientific ocean drilling of atolls and reef terraces can achieve meter accuracy of sea-level history over the last 20,000 years, and perhaps longer.