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Climate did not drive Common Era Maldivian sea-level lowstands

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 22 April 2021

The Original Article was published on 16 December 2019

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Fig. 1: Pre-industrial radiative forcing and SST changes.
Fig. 2: Post-industrial sea-level changes near the Maldives.

Data availability

Temperature-sensitive Common Era proxy records from the PAGES2k project12 were taken from the current data version available from the National Climatic Data Center website on 22 Jan 2020 (www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/pages2k/pages2k-temperature-v2-2017/). Only low-resolution oceanic data (‘O2kLR’) covering most of the Common Era in the study area were used. Numerical codes for the circulation model from ref. 11 are available for download from G.G.’s website (https://www2.whoi.edu/staff/ggebbie/). Total solar irradiance during the Holocene from ref. 5 was downloaded from the National Climatic Data Center server on 3 Feb 2020 (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/steinhilber2009tsi.txt). The estimates of volcanic aerosol forcing from ref. 6 are as provided in the online version of the paper as of 3 Feb 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14565). The tide-gauge sea-level data were extracted from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level database13 on 24 Feb 2020 (https://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/). Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

C.G.P. acknowledges support from NSF grant OCE-2002485, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Endowed Fund for Innovative Research and the Joint Initiative Awards Fund from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. G.G. acknowledges support from NSF grant OCE-1760958. A.J.M. acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation Singapore and the Singapore Ministry of Education under the Research Centres of Excellence initiative, and also from the National Research Foundation Singapore under its NRF Fellowship scheme (Award NRF-NRFF11-2019-0008). We thank P. Kench for helpful conversations on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physical Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    Christopher G. Piecuch & Geoffrey Gebbie

  2. Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Andrew C. Kemp

  3. Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Aron J. Meltzner

  4. Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Aron J. Meltzner

Authors
  1. Christopher G. Piecuch
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  2. Andrew C. Kemp
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  3. Geoffrey Gebbie
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  4. Aron J. Meltzner
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Contributions

C.G.P., A.C.K. and G.G. conceived the study. All of the authors designed methods and analysed data. C.G.P. wrote the manuscript with input from A.C.K., G.G. and A.J.M.

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Correspondence to Christopher G. Piecuch.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Geoscience thanks Anthony Purcell and Alex Thomas for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: James Super. 

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Discussion, Figs. 1–5, and Table 1.

Supplementary Data 1

Supplementary Data relating to Fig. 1 and Supplementary Fig. 2.

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Piecuch, C.G., Kemp, A.C., Gebbie, G. et al. Climate did not drive Common Era Maldivian sea-level lowstands. Nat. Geosci. 14, 273–275 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00731-2

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