Sea levels are set to fall over millions of years, making the current rise blamed on climate change a brief interruption of an ancient geological trend, scientists said on Thursday. They said oceans were getting deeper and sea levels had fallen by about 170 meters (560 ft) since the Cretaceous period 80 million years ago when dinosaurs lived. Previously, the little-understood fall had been estimated at 40 to 250 meters. "The ocean floor has got on average older and gone down and so the sea level has also fallen," said Bernhard Steinberger at the Geological Survey of Norway, one of five authors of a report in the journal Science. The study aids understanding of sea levels by showing that geology has played a big role alongside ice ages, which can suck vast amounts of water from the oceans onto land. "If we humans still exist in 10, 20 or 50 million years, irrespective of how ice caps are waxing and waning, the long term ... is that sea level will drop, not rise," said lead author Dietmar Muller of the University of Sydney. Over time, Muller told Science in a podcast interview there would be fewer mid-ocean ridges and a shift to more deep plains in the oceans as continents shifted. The Atlantic would widen and the Pacific shrink. Still, the projected rate of fall works out at 0.015 centimeters a century -- irrelevant when the U.N. Climate Panel estimates that seas will rise by 18-59 cms by 2100 because of global warming stoked by human use of fossil fuels.

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