Tag: sea level rise

Sea level is rising all over the world thanks to the heat-trapping effect of greenhouse-gas emissions, but according to a new study published in the Journal of Coastal Research, the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada have seen the ocean rise at an accelerating rate in recent decades.

Sea Level Rise Threatens Countries, Regions And Cities Around The World

Satellites see Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet M

melting ice, sea level rise, global warming , ocean warming

New study shows Rising sea levels cannot be stopped over the next several hundred years, even if deep emissions cuts lower global average temperatures, but they can be slowed down, climate scientists said in a study on Sunday.A lot of climate research shows that rising greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for increasing global average surface temperatures by about 0.17 degrees Celsius a decade from 1980-2010 and for a sea level rise of about 2.3mm a year from 2005-2010 as ice caps and glaciers melt.Rising sea levels threaten about a tenth of the world's population who live in low-lying areas and islands which are at risk of flooding, including the Caribbean, Maldives and Asia-Pacific island groups.More than 180 countries are negotiating a new global climate pact which will come into force by 2020 and force all nations to cut emissions to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius this century - a level scientists say is the minimum required to avert catastrophic effects.But even if the most ambitious emissions cuts are made, it might not be enough to stop sea levels rising due to the thermal expansion of sea water, said scientists at the United States' National Centre for Atmospheric Research, ...

Study reveals Sea levels from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod are rising at a faster pace than anywhere on Earth, making coastal cities and wetlands in this densely-populated U.S. corridor possibly more vulnerable to flooding and damage, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey reported.Climate change is causing higher sea levels around the world, as land-based glaciers like those on Greenland melt and slide into the oceans and as warming ocean water expands.But seas don't rise at the same rate, and for 600 miles along the U.S. Atlantic coast, the water is rising more rapidly than elsewhere on the globe, USGS scientists reported on Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.In this "hot spot" of rising sea levels, variations in ocean currents and sea water temperature and salinity push oceans upward along the coastline, the scientists said.It could have an impact on some of the biggest urban areas along and near the East Coast, including Boston, Providence, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Norfolk-Virginia Beach, especially when storm surges push water inland.Researchers found that sea levels in this corridor were rising between three and four times faster than the global average, and they fit with computer simulations aimed at predicting the ...

Satellite observations analyzed data Recent years have brought unprecedented melting to Arctic sea ice, the white cap that covers the far north. Now, months before the sea ice reaches its annual minimum extent, this summer looks likely to follow suit, bringing unusually ice-free waters.Satellite observations analyzed by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center show the extent of the sea ice hovering below the baseline, the average between 1979 and 2000, for most of the spring and dipping particularly low in June."It definitely portends a low-ice year, whether it means it will go below 2007 (the record minimum in September), it is too early to tell," Meier said.The sea ice undergoes a seasonal cycle, spreading across the Arctic waters during winter and retreating in the warmth of summer. Historically, the ice - which provides important habitat for walrus and polar bears - reaches its minimum extent between the first week of September and around the end of the third week of the month, according to Walt Meier, a research scientist at NSIDC.Recent years rank as the lowest on record since continuous record-keeping began in 1979, and scientists blame a combination of natural weather fluctuations, such as wind patterns, and ...

0.7 millimeters per year to sea level change The Greenland ice sheet continues to lose mass and thus contributes at about 0.7 millimeters per year to the currently observed sea level change of about 3 mm per year. This trend increases each year by a further 0.07 millimeters per year. The pattern and temporal nature of loss is complex.The mass loss is largest in southwest and northwest Greenland; the respective contributions of melting, iceberg calving and fluctuations in snow accumulation differing considerably. This result has been published by an international research group led by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in the latest issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 1 June 2012.The result was made possible by a new comparison of three different types of satellite observations: measurements of the change in gravity by changes in ice mass with the satellite pair GRACE, height variation with the laser altimeter on the NASA satellite ICESat and determination of the difference between the accumulation of regional atmospheric models and the glacier discharge, as measured by satellite radar data.For the first time and for each region, the researchers could determine with unprecedented precision which percentage melting, iceberg calving and fluctuations in ...

WHOI video WHOI physical oceanographer Fiamma Straneo examines the connection between ocean conditions and climate-driven changes to Greenland glaciers and describes some of the challenges to doing scientific research in the far north.

Harvard scientists use a statistical tool to track sea level rise and determine how It was used to help Apollo astronauts navigate in space, and has since been applied to problems as diverse as economics and weather forecasting, but Harvard scientists are now using a powerful statistical tool to not only track sea level rise over time, but to determine where the water causing the rise is coming from.As described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), graduate students Eric Morrow and Carling Hay demonstrate the use of a statistical tool called a Kalman smoother to identify "sea level fingerprints" - tell-tale variations in sea level rise - in a synthetic data set. Using those fingerprints, scientists can determine where glacial melting is occurring."The goal was to establish a rigorous and precise method for extracting those fingerprints from this very noisy signal," Professor of Geophysics Jerry Mitrovica, who oversaw the research, said. "What Carling and Eric have come up with is very elegant and it provides a powerful method for detecting the fingerprints. In my view everyone is soon going to be using this method."At the heart of the new technique is the idea, first proposed by ...