New Paper: Sea Level jump at onset of Younger Dryas?

There was an interesting paper from Science last week concerning sea-level rise in and around the Younger Dryas.  It looks  as though there may have been a relatively small — but dramatically fast–  rise in Sea-Level just before the YD:

Deglacial Meltwater Pulse 1B and Younger Dryas Sea Levels Revisited with Boreholes at Tahiti, from Edouard Bard, Bruno Hamelin, Doriane Delanghe-Sabatier.

Abstract:

Reconstructing sea-level changes during the last deglaciation provides a way of understanding the ice dynamics thatcan perturb large continental ice sheets. The resolution of the few sea-level records covering the critical time interval between 14 and 9 thousand calendar years before the present (cal kyr B.P.) is still insufficient to draw conclusions about sea-level changes associated with the Younger Dryas (YD) cold event and the meltwater pulse 1B (MWP-1B). Here, we use the U-Th method to date shallow-living corals from three new cores drilled onshore in the Tahiti barrierreef. No significant discontinuity can be detected in the sea-level rise during the MWP-1B period. The new Tahiti sea-level record shows that the sea-level rise slowed down during the YD before accelerating again during the Holocene.

In addition, the coral data plotted in Fig. 1 could suggest a

small step (<6 m) in sea level near the onset of the YD event

at around 13 kyr B.P. (arrow in Fig. 1). This small step also

corresponds to a rate change both in the Barbados and Tahiti

records. At Huon, this period is covered by only a few corals

that could possibly be fitted with a small step. However, the

existence of such a structure is within the overall uncertainty

of the approach (see details in SOM Text 2) and thus remains

speculative