Abstract
Information about past sea-level change is crucial for understanding coastal tectonic movements and seismic hazards. Locally, sediment isostatic adjustment (SIA) induced by erosional unloading and depositional loading could play an important role in sea-level change. However, such effects are commonly neglected, potentially leading to biased estimates of vertical tectonic deformation rate. Here we constructed a new sediment transfer history for Taiwan, where erosion and deposition are among the fastest on Earth, and used it to drive the numerical sea-level model to quantify SIA effects on the sea-level change and tectonic uplift estimates. Our simulations revealed that SIA could cause substantial spatial variation in sea-level change along Taiwan’s coasts, producing local relative sea-level change of >200 meters since 122 ka. We found that neglecting SIA effects can result in overestimation and underestimation of tectonic coastal uplift rates by up to 90% or more. Our results highlight the global importance of considering spatially varying SIA-driven sea-level changes when using paleo-sea-level indicators to characterize coastal tectonic movements.
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Data availability
The datasets used in this study are available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18212597). This repository contains Excel files comprising the compiled rates of sediment redistribution used to reconstruct the sediment transfer history, as well as the information of paleo-sea-level indicators used to evaluate tectonic coastal uplift rates.
Code availability
The gravitationally self-consistent sea-level model can be accessed at https://github.com/jaustermann/SLcode.
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Acknowledgements
The authors sincerely thank Yu Wang for insightful discussions, Chia-Hsun Lin for technical support in numerical modeling, and Hoi Ling Birdie Chou for graphical suggestions. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions, which significantly improved this article. This research was supported by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) of Taiwan (Project 110-2116-M-002-019, 111-2116-M-002-044, 112-2116-M-002-030, and 113-2116-M-002-025-MY2 to J.B.H.S.).
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A.H. contributed to conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, model implementation, validation, visualization, writing-original draft, and writing-review and editing. J.B.H.S. contributed to conceptualization, project administration, funding acquisition, supervision, writing-original draft, and writing-review and editing. E.T. and K.L.F. contributed to methodology, software, validation, and writing-review and editing.
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Ho, A., Shyu, J.B.H., Tan, E. et al. Estimating tectonic coastal uplift requires accounting for sea-level variations caused by rapid sediment redistribution. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03302-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03302-8
