Latest Current sea level rise Stories

ESA's CryoSat team working on the Greenland ice sheet has been honored with a visit from a Dutch delegation including HRH Prince of Orange. The visit is part of a tour to learn more about climate change in polar regions and consequences for the environment.Prince Willem-Alexander's visit to Greenland was at the invitation of the World Wide Fund for Nature-Netherlands. The delegation included Johan van de Gronden, CEO of WWF-NL, Robbert Dijkgraaf, President of the Royal Dutch Academy of...

According to an international report, climate change in the Arctic could raise world sea levels to 5 feet by 2100. A rise like this would threaten the coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, low-lying Pacific islands and cities from London to Shanghai.  It would also raise costs of building tsunami barriers in Japan. "The past six years (until 2010) have been the warmest period ever recorded in the Arctic," according to the Oslo-based Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme...

According to a new study, melting glaciers and ice caps on Canadian Arctic islands play a much greater role in sea level rise than scientists previously thought. There are bout 30,000 islands within the 550,000-square-mile Canadian Arctic Archipelago.  The study found that between 2004 and 2009, the region lost the equivalent of three-quarters of the water in Lake Erie. Alex Gardner, a research fellow in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of...

New forecasts on rising sea levels suggest that New York will be a big loser, while some regions, including those closer to polar regions, will win big, reports BBC News.. A 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast sea levels to rise by as much as 1 foot by 2100. But that forecast was a global average. A Dutch team has now made an attempt to model all the factors leading to regional variations. And whatever the global figure turns out to be, there will be...

Ice sheets have been losing mass at an accelerated rate over the past two decades, and these changes could soon become the dominant contributor to rising global sea levels, a NASA-funded study has discovered.The results of the nearly 20-year satellite research project--the longest study ever to track changes in polar ice sheet mass--showed that ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic lost an average of 475 gigatons of combined mass annually.Each gigaton is roughly equal to 2.2 trillion...

An international team of scientists working in the most remote parts of Antarctica have discovered that masses of ice form underneath the ice sheet instead of on top, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.Liquid water locked deep under Antarctica's coat of ice regularly thaws, and then refreezes to the bottom, creating as much as half the thickness of the ice in some places, the researchers said. "We usually think of ice sheets like cakes -- one layer at a time...

An assessment of coastal change over the past 150 years has found 68 percent of beaches in the New England and Mid-Atlantic region are eroding, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report released today. Scientists studied more than 650 miles of the New England and Mid-Atlantic coasts and found the average rate of coastal change "“ taking into account beaches that are both eroding and prograding -- was negative 1.6 feet per year.  Of those beaches eroding, the most extreme case exceeded...

The contribution of Greenland to global sea level change and the mapping of previously unknown basins and mountains beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet are highlighted in a new film released by Cambridge University this morning.The work of glaciologist Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of Cambridge University's Scott Polar Research Institute, is the focus of This Icy World, the latest film in the University's Cambridge Ideas series.A frequent visitor to both the Arctic and Antarctic,...

Rising sea levels could threaten an average of 9 percent of the land within 180 US coastal cities by 2100, according to new research led by University of Arizona scientists. The Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts will be particularly affected. The cities of Miami, New Orleans, Tampa, Fla., and Virginia Beach, Va. could lose more than 10 percent of their land area by 2100.This is the first analysis of vulnerability to sea-level rise that includes every US coastal city in the lower 48 with a...

A set of maps created by the University of Sheffield have illustrated, for the first time, how our last British ice sheet shrunk during the Ice Age.Led by Professor Chris Clark from the University´s Department of Geography, a team of experts developed the maps to understand what effect the current shrinking of ice sheets in parts of the Antarctic and Greenland will have on the speed of sea level rise.The unique maps record the pattern and speed of shrinkage of the large ice sheet that...