What exactly causes Ocean levels to rise?

[Datajack Franit]

Yeah. Jungles however lose the bonus at the first attempt or intense terraforming (changing rainfall patterns will dry them up someday)

[Kirov]

I'm pretty sure that raising Fossil Field Ridge only one level up cause it to lose its bonus.

[Capt Dizle]

I used to have some notes on this but I don't know where I put them. What about raising the flats? Don't they lose their bonus?

[CEO Aaron]

As far as I know, _any_ elevation change will disrupt the harvest bonuses from landmarks.

As to the base thread, the combined eco-damage of all operating factions contributes to Global Warming. Also, building tree farms and centauri preserves increases the clean mineral limit only for your faction. In one game I conquered Zak fairly early, and got the idea of building his cities _WAY_ up before giving them back to him. After about 20 turns of rush-building facilities, I returned all his stuff to him, with every facility I could think of: Fusion Labs, 'Jack Factories, Hybrid Forests, you name it. 2 turns after I gave him his empire back, I get the warning telling me sea levels will be rising. I checked my Eco-damage: Zero, for my entire faction. Then I checked Zak's bases, and woudn't you know, he was polluting up a storm with all that stuff I gave him. As far as I can tell, AI factions also never experience fungal pops, but I could be mistaken. Has anyone seen a polluting AI incite worm-rape?

[Dr Jekyll]

I haven't seen that certainly. Then again, I never get global warming problems either, since I virtually never run Market and I'm *really* careful about eco-damage (that is, when I'm playing Lal, with the Gaians - my other favorite faction - it's self-explanatory ), so I'm not much of an expert on that.

[Spacecow]

In response to the sinking landmarks, I remember in a game where there was a LOT of global warming, a volcano had popped up previously, and before it was half sunk, all 9 of the specially marked "volcano" squares had returned to normal squares.

Something interesting along the same lines...
Deidre had a size 14 base that was endangered but didn't have a pressure dome, so I decided to take advantage of the situation and lay siege to her city by letting needlejets float above all squares in her city's radius that would've produced minerals (and since her city was about to sink, more than half of her city's squares were underwater, so I only had to lay siege to three squares). On the turn that the city sank, she was only a few minerals shy of completing it (on the last row, anyway). Instead of killing the city off, however, the computer decided to make a bit of a compromise. Her city ended up being a sea base with a pressure dome, but only was a size 6 city. Is this just a bug, or some programmer's justification for the AI being too stupid to rush build the pressure dome?

Yet another interesting thing that happened in that game...
Lal's AI, for whatever reason, decided he didn't mind if his cities sank into the sea. Because of this, about 1/3 of his cities were submerged. I was playing Yang, and therefore was at war with him. He put about 3 weenie sea bases near my mainland, and I picked them off with some needlejets and a locust. So what's he do? HE SURRENDERS TO ME! I'm running PS (like any good Yang should do), my land forces are nowhere near his (my mainland was on the other side of a large map from his), and he's still got around 9 good sized cities with a SP or two! Despite his losses, he was still third on the powergraph. My best guess is that he thought *I* destroyed those bases. Maybe the AI only looks at how much your power rating drops when at war to determine if they should surrender.
Hmmm... if that's true... Santiago could be kicking Morgan's tail across the map, and if I took a city or two, maybe Morgan would surrender to me. Ah, but that's getting too far off the thread subject...