Philadelphia Inquirer: Forty miles off the Jersey Shore, an international team of scientists is grappling with a worrisome phenomenon: The oceans are slowly rising. The researchers are not studying the sea itself. Living for weeks at a time on this drilling platform, they are burrowing down into the past, pulling up cores of prehistoric sediment from nearly half a mile below the ocean floor. By studying how the Earth responded when the sea rose and fell at various times millions of years ago, the …