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Isostasy G Milne and I Shennan, Durham University, Durham, UK ª 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Introduction Relative sea level (RSL) is defined as the height of the ocean surface relative to the solid Earth (or ocean floor) and can be defined at any location within the oceans. Changes in RSL are driven, therefore, by processes that produce a height shift in either of these two bounding surfaces. At any given location, RSL changes over a wide range of timescales with characteristic periods ranging from less than a second to millions of years. This broad spectrum of time variation reflects the variety of processes that drive RSL changes: atmospheric circulation, ocean circula- tion, changes in the distribution of grounded ice, lunar tides, deformation of the solid Earth associated with internal buoyancy forces (mantle convection), and changes in the distribution of mass at the Earth’s surface (e.g., growth and melting of ice sheets, ero- sion, and deposition of rocks). During the Quaternary, the dominant component of the RSL change observed using proxy records was driven by the accumulation and ablation of major ice sheets. There are a number of physical mechanisms associated with this glaciation-induced sea-level change and these are described in the following sec- tion. Models that incorporate these mechanisms can be employed to predict RSL changes, which can, in turn, be compared to the observations. It is through this modeling procedure that researchers have been able to better understand the physical processes involved in driving sea-level changes as well as place constraints on key model parameters. The most common applications of this type will be pre- sented in the section ‘Applications of Sea-Level Models.’ SEA LEVEL STUDIES/Isostasy 3043