75
These sea-level clues are hard to find but it’s never boring searching for them!
Along the way I meet interested people, eager to help or to share their knowledge of
their part of the planet. This is always a help, with the possible exception of the time
I met a group of Malay teenagers in an oil palm plantation. After explaining, in
broken Malay, that I was looking for places where old fossil shells could be found,
a caravan of them excitedly hopped on their motor scooters to escort me to the special shell place they knew. Imagine my surprise when we pulled up at a Shell Petrol
station! It may have been the wrong outcome, but it’s typical of the willingness of
Malaysian people to help in any way.
A New Horizon
So, how did I wind up in Malaysia in the first place? I was assisting NOAA with
shoreline recovery efforts along the US Gulf Coast following the 2010 DeepwaterHorizon oil spill when Steve Culver, Chair of East Carolina University’s Department
Fig. 5.6 The author
collecting fossil rockencrusting oysters in a
partially flooded limestone
cave in the Langkawi
Archipelago. Chiang Ong
holds the ladder. (Image by
Timothy Shaw)
5 A Different Kind of Sea-Level Story from Malaysia