Warning: sea levels can rise quickly

In Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica Rebecca Priestley, a contributor to the NZ SeaRise programme, offers a deeply personal tour of Antarctica.

In this excerpt, published in Turbine | Kapohau, she takes a trip to the Whanganui Basin.

One of the best places in the world to see evidence of past sea-level changes—marking sequential warming and cooling of the Earth’s climate—is in Whanganui, just a couple of hours’ drive north of Wellington. I was keen to see what this evidence looked like, so one spring morning I started my day by meeting a couple of geology colleagues at the university café that’s just down the stairs from my office. Cliff Atkins was there when I arrived, wearing jeans, boots and a heavy shirt, buying himself an Americano and a chocolate Afghan to go.

‘Breakfast of champions,’ he said with a grin, as I ordered my trim flat white.

Tim Naish turned up next. In a houndstooth jacket and glasses he can look quite professorial—he is a professor, after all—but on this day he was wearing jeans, a North Face fleece jacket, and mud-covered tramping boots. He carried a pile of books, including Charles Fleming’s The Geology of Wanganui Subdivision—a landmark 1953 study of what we now call the Whanganui Region—a garden spade, and a backpack.

Read more at Turbine|Kapohau