Landform Shifts Associated with Ice Melting

A couple of articles discussing the paradoxical effect of glacial ice melting over land masses and archeologic studies of ancient civilization on human responses:


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/science/earth/18juneau.html

May 18, 2009
As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising
JUNEAU, Alaska — Global warming conjures images of rising seas that threaten coastal areas. But in Juneau, as almost nowhere else in the world, climate change is having the opposite effect: As the glaciers here melt, the land is rising, causing the sea to retreat.
Morgan DeBoer, a property owner, opened a nine-hole golf course at the mouth of Glacier Bay in 1998, on land that was underwater when his family first settled here 50 years ago. (cut)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227096.600-rising-sea-levels-survival-tips-from-5000-bc.html?full=true

Rising sea levels: Survival tips from 5000 BC
26 May 2009 by Catherine Brahic
WITH rising seas lapping at coastal cities and threatening to engulf entire islands in the not-too-distant future, it's easy to assume our only option will be to abandon them and head for the hills. There may be another way, however. Archaeological sites in the Caribbean, dating back to 5000 BC, show that some ancient civilisations had it just as bad as anything we are expecting. Yet not only did they survive a changing coastline and more storm surges and hurricanes: they stayed put and successfully adapted to the changing world. Now archaeologists are working out how they managed it and finding ways that we might learn from their example.
The sea-level rise that our ancestors dealt with had nothing to do with human-induced climate change, of course: it was a hangover from the last ice age. As the massive ice sheet that lay on North America melted, the continent was buoyed upwards. As a result, the northern Caribbean, on the other end of the same tectonic plate, sank, making seas in the region rise up to 5 metres over 5000 years. (cut)

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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
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