Holocene and Common Era sea level changes in the Makassar Strait, Indonesia

Abstract. Indonesia is a country composed of several thousand islands, many of them small, low-lying and densely inhabited. These are, in particular, subject to high risk of inundation due to future relative sea level changes. The Spermonde Archipelago, off the coast of Southwest Sulawesi, consists of more than 100 small islands. This study presents a dataset of 24 sea-level index points from fossil microatolls, surveyed on five islands in the Spermonde Archipelago and compares these new results with published data from the same region and with relative sea level predictions from different Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) models. The newly surveyed fossil microatolls are located around the islands of Tambakulu, Suranti (both ~ 60 km offshore of Makassar city), Bone Batang and Kodingareng Keke (both located in the center of the Archipelago) and Sanrobengi (located ~ 20 km south-southwest of Makassar). Results from the near- and mid-shelf islands indicate that relative sea level between 4 to 6 ka BP was less than one meter above present sea level. The only exception to this pattern is the heavily populated island of Barrang Lompo, where we record a significant subsidence when compared to the other islands. These new results support the conclusions from a previous dataset and are relevant to constrain late Holocene ice melting scenarios. Samples from the two outer islands (Tambakulu and Suranti) yielded ages spanning the Common Era that represent, to our knowledge, the first reported for the entire Southeast Asian region.