Sea-level rise could be way, way worse than we already thought

Sea-level rise could be way, way worse than we already thought

Petrov Stanislav

Could your city look like this in 2100 (assuming it hasn’t

looked like this already

)?

It might be time to buy that dry suit you’ve had your eye on — or start saving up for a submersible.

“Glaciologists fear they may have seriously underestimated the potential for melting ice sheets to contribute to catastrophic sea-level rises in coming decades,” reports The Independent. Here’s more from NBC News:

Melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland may push up global sea levels more than 3 feet by the end of this century, according to a scientific poll of experts that brings a degree of clarity to a murky and controversial slice of climate science.

Such a rise in the seas would displace millions of people from low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, swamp atolls in the Pacific Ocean, cause dikes in Holland to fail, and cost coastal mega-cities from New York to Tokyo billions of dollars for construction of sea walls and other infrastructure to combat the tides.

“The consequences are horrible,” Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the study published Jan. 6 in the journal Nature Climate Change, told NBC News. …

The estimates are higher than the controversial figures in the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of up to 23 inches (59 centimeters) and higher than the unpublished estimates being prepared for the next IPCC report, said Bamber, who is a review editor for that document and has seen the estimates.

Add this to the growing pile of sobering sea-level studies, along with recent ones about how western Antarctica is warming three times faster than the rest of the world and polar ice sheets are melting three times faster than during the ’90s.

Oh, and that one about how historic sea-level rises have been linked to volcanic eruptions.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on

Twitter

and

Google+

.

Read more:

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Continued here:  

Sea-level rise could be way, way worse than we already thought

This entry was posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.