Documenting the transition from late Holocene relative sea-level fall to observed modern rise in Vesterålen, Northern Norway

Most of the outer Norwegian arctic coastline is experiencing relative sea-level (RSL) rise despite being near-field areas with ongoing vertical land uplift due to glacioisostatic adjustment. However, due to a lack of pre-instrumental RSL-data over the last millennium, the transition from falling to rising RSL is not well constrained in time and space.

In this project we have reconstructed the past 500 years of RSL-history of the Vesterålen archipelago in northern Norway. We have analyzed salt-marsh sediments using preserved agglutinated foraminifera as proxy evidence of local RSL- change. Our data bridges the gap between the instrumental record and previous palaeo-RSL reconstructions and provides new insights into the recent sea-level history of the region.

Here, we will present our modeled RSL-curve and highlight our main results regarding when the transition from sea-level regression to the current sea-level transgression occurred, and the magnitude of post-industrial sea-level rise in the region.