THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, January 25, 1996             TAG: 9601250463
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, MASS.                   LENGTH: Medium:   64 lines

AS THE SEA RISES, OUR LAND IS SINKING SCIENTISTS SAY THE MID-ATLANTIC COAST IS SINKING INTO THE OCEAN, WITH THE CHESAPEAKE BAY REGION GOING DOWN 1 INCH EVERY 8 YEARS.

Scientists studying rising sea levels on the East Coast made a startling discovery: It's not just that the sea is climbing - the land is falling, too.

New research shows that the level of the mid-Atlantic coast is falling as a bulge formed by Ice Age glaciers slowly settles.

That, combined with apparent rising sea levels, means the ocean is encroaching on the Chesapeake Bay region at a rate of about one inch every eight years.

In other places on the East Coast, the sea is taking back the land at the rate of about an inch every 25 years.

The good news: land in areas north and west of New York, relieved of the weight of heavy glacial ice, is holding firm or rising.

``It had been known before that the sea levels around Chesapeake Bay in particular seemed to be rising faster than we predicted, but no one knew why,'' said James Davis, a geophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and one of two researchers who document their work in today's edition of the journal Nature. ``What we've found is that the land is falling.''

Baffled by evidence that the sea level was rising faster

between Florida and New York than along the coastline farther north, some scientists had theorized that there had been a shift in the Gulf Stream, the current that runs northward parallel to shore. Others speculated that the oceans were becoming warmer, since warm water expands.

In fact, according to Davis and co-researcher Jerry Mitrovica of the University of Toronto, the level of the land is falling in some coastal areas while remaining steady in some others.

The mid-Atlantic coast, including Washington, will become more prone to flooding and erosion as a result, though such dramatic changes may take decades, Davis said.

Ice Age glaciers nearly 2 miles thick and centered in the Hudson Valley weighed so much that land beneath them sank more than half a mile at the deepest point beginning about 100,000 years ago, Davis and Mitrovica calculated. Land at the glaciers' boundaries bulged like mud that rises at the edges of a footprint.

In the 10,000 years since the glaciers melted, land that was beneath them has been springing back while the adjoining bulges settle.

The findings have broad implications in the debate about sea level changes blamed on global warming. Scientists have warned that warming caused by carbon dioxide and industrial gases is melting glaciers and will raise the sea level by between 6 inches and 3 feet over the next 100 years.

But nearly half the sites where sea level was measured in a pivotal 1991 study of this problem were on the East Coast of the United States, where the uneven settling of land may have exaggerated the apparent rise in water.

``What it means is, this is not some fluke,'' Davis said.

``It's not an ocean current. It's not something that will go away soon. Even if the sea level wasn't rising, the Chesapeake Bay would still be sinking.'' by CNB