Nothing is more romantic than frothy waves breaking on a Bermuda beach, and nothing is more of a nightmare than those same waves breaking against your front porch.

That is why Canadian geologist Steve Blasco and a team of other scientists were on the Island recently to look at how global warming is affecting rising sea levels.

The team from the Geological Survey of Canada in Nova Scotia is working with the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI), the Aquarium, the Ministry of Works & Engineering and the Environment Ministry.

?People often ask us, why Bermuda?? Mr. Blasco told . ?There are a couple of reasons. First, Bermuda already has a history of sea level research that started in the 1960s.

?This rich database does not exist elsewhere, but it now needs to be updated.

?It is a good place to find new information on rising sea levels. It is also important to other nations. I think it is important that Bermudians know that the research we are doing effects Canada, because we can use it as a calibration point. We share the Atlantic. Whatever is happening in Bermuda is happening in Canada too.

?Remember when you had Fabian? We had Hurricane Juan on the same month. So our research has international significance, and we are hoping that in the end it will help decision makers and set guidelines in the future.?

One of the things that makes Bermuda interesting to people studying sea levels is a number of drowned forests around the Island.

?There are at least three drowned forests around Bermuda,? said Mr. Blasco. ?You don?t find that very often. It is very rare.?

These drowned cedar forests ? the oldest 7,000 years old ? provide vital clues to what the Bermuda coastline looked like in the past, and also what it may look like in the future.

?One of the cedar forests is in Harrington Sound in 26 feet of water. It is about 6,300 years old. We can use these cedar forests to understand the rate of sea levels rising, and how we can protect our coasts in the future.?

While in Bermuda in May, the team examined an area of drowned mangroves not far from Nonsuch Island.

?On the sea floor today are the remains of several stumps from black mangroves,? said Mr. Blasco. ?They would have been there up to 1,400 years ago. Now they are under four feet of water. Mangroves are important because they grow where the sea touches the coast.

?They are fair size stumps so they were very big and healthy at one point. If you were here between 1,400 years ago you would have seen something like what you see at Mangrove Bay today.?

Given that the mangroves are under four feet of water, the team calculated that sea levels have been rising around Bermuda for about a foot a century.

To find out more about sea levels, the team decided to dig underneath these old mangrove stumps.

?We found it had been a mangrove bog,? said Mr. Blasco. ?Underneath we found several feet of organics that is the compressed remains of leaves and pieces of wood and stuff that comes off the trees.?

The team found that before the mangroves existed, from 3,000 to 5,000 years ago there was an extensive pond near Nonsuch Island.

After the hole was dug under this mangrove forest, another scientist, Bruce Rueger of Colby College, took soil samples all the way down the wall of the hole.

?Dr. Rueger?s expertise is vegetation of the past,? said Mr. Blasco. ?He looks at what it was like here over the past 1,000 years. Trees, plants and bushes all have pollen which is blown by the wind. It is blown offshore too, and it accumulates on the bottom over time. Over geologic time you get different layers. Looking at these different layers will allow Dr. Rueger to reconstruct the history of Bermuda vegetation between 7,000 and 15,000 years ago.?

By radiocarbon dating the samples, Dr. Rueger tried to answer such questions as, ?how far in the past was Bermuda covered by cedar forests?, and ?were there other important trees on the Island?.

?Mr. Rueger is important to our story, because knowing the type of vegetation that was here will tell us something about the climate. It will tell us whether it was cooler, hotter, warmer or wetter, drier. Over the next couple of years we will learn what it was like here over the last couple thousand years.

?We already know that sea levels were rising for several thousand years, before man came along. We are actually effecting the climate, so it is starting to rise faster. So we can now understand what the contribution of Mother Nature is verses the contribution of man. That will give us a better understanding of what to do for the future.?

Mr. Blasco said rising sea levels don?t have to mean that you don?t build by the ocean, but that you make accommodations for it.

?In actual fact, you can take a look at what rising sea levels can do, and build and design your structures along the coast to cope with that,? Mr. Blasco said. ?In the US in some areas there are certain building codes that take into account rising sea levels.

?The important thing is trying to understand what rate it is going up, so engineers can design and build proper things. It is doable, but we tend to ignore sea levels sometimes.?

Mr. Blasco said he has also looked at water levels in the Great Lakes region.

?There, the levels are dropping instead of going up,? said Mr. Blasco, ?because the climate is more arid and there is more evaporation and less moisture getting into the lakes. So we were studying lake level changes.

?That is what I was doing in Canada and then this opportunity came up with the BUEI and jointly with the Aquarium.?

The sea level investigating team includes a number of Bermudians who are helping with the project.

?The Aquarium has provided the Calamus for us to do our research,? said Mr. Blasco. ?Teddy Tucker is my co-chief scientist on the project. The two key divers are Phillipe Rouja and James Davidson. Mr. Rouja is working on shipwrecks and the relationship between sea levels and the wrecks and their preservation. Boy do these two work hard.?

Mr. Blasco used to scuba dive, but does not anymore due to eyesight problems. He snorkels now instead.

?I get into the water, and hang above the divers and I point,? he said. ?We should be able to tell you next year whether the samples in the hole we excavated went back 5,000 years and what might have been the climatic changes as sea levels was steadily rising.

?The question now is at what rate will it rise in the future, and what are the implications to coastal development?? said Mr. Blasco. ?How do we plan for the future, and plan and develop the coast? We are for recreation and commerce. How do we do it in the future, effectively and economically? It all feeds into that.?