ABSTRACT
Today the planet is experiencing a significant warming. The predictions of what the future might be is the subject of much debate and argument, often based more on ideological opinion than on scientific facts. For example, for a brief period in the 1970s there was a supposition that the Earth was entering a period of cooling, which caught the public’s imagination with stories of glaciers advancing on Western Europe. The observed warming trend and the preceding cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, which some have suggested lasted approximately between the 1300s and 1800s have had precedents. These periods of climatic fluctuation have been linked to changes in sea level and some have speculated that the collective myths and memories of universal floods, Atlantis and sunken continents are an echo of these events. This is one reason why the observation and investigation of signs associated with sea-level change has been a source of reference indicators for estimating past climates. It was the obvious localised signs of former sea levels, in the form of raised beaches and fossilised dunes, along with evidence of submerged or elevated remains of human settlements that served to highlight past climate changes. They were assumed to have been caused by sea-level changes in recent geological time, known as the Plio-Quaternary period of about 2 million years ago.
