Latest Sea level Stories
Scientists are now predicting sea levels will climb another several inches -- or even a few feet -- by the year 2100, according to recent studies. Studying cliffs and ancient reefs on the sub-tropical islands of the Bahamas and Bermuda, scientists are investigating global sea rise and comparing these results against data from more than a century ago. The Bahamas and Bermuda have been attracting fossil hunters for many years. The land on the Bahamas, for example, is built on a foundation...
Nearly four million Americans, occupying a combined area larger than the state of Maryland, find themselves at risk of severe flooding as sea levels rise in the coming century, new research suggests. A new study, published today, 14 March, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, asserts that around 32,000 km2 of US land lies within one vertical meter of the high tide line, encompassing 2.1 million housing units where 3.9 million people live. For this study, the...
GEOLOGY posted ahead of print 14 Feb.–2 Mar. is a dynamic collection of papers covering modeling studies of the U.S. New Madrid Seismic Zone; landslide prediction through examination of the Slumgullion landslide, Colorado; investigation of a potential nuclear waste repository site in Finland; understanding river delta formation and long-term evolution with insights from the Mekong River, Vietnam; and an explanation of how drought drove forest decline and dune building in eastern upper...
[ Watch the Video ] In a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, scientists using NASA data have found that Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are losing nearly 150 billion tons of ice annually. Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), researchers were able to measure ice loss in all of Earth’s land ice between 2003 and 2010. What...
La Niña, "the diva of drought," is peaking, increasing the odds that the Pacific Northwest will have more stormy weather this winter and spring, while the southwestern and southern United States will be dry. Sea surface height data from NASA's Jason-1 and -2 satellites show that the milder repeat of last year's strong La Niña has recently intensified, as seen in the latest Jason-2 image of the Pacific Ocean shown above. The image is based on the average of 10 days of data centered on...
A higher-than-normal 2010 melting season sped up the melting of ice in southern Greenland, causing sizable portions of the island's bedrock to rise somewhere about a quarter of an inch more than usual, an Ohio State University (OSU) researcher said on Friday. According to an OSU press release, Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor in the OSU School of Earth Sciences, said that 50 GPS stations spread across the coast of Greenland normally "detect uplift of 15 mm...
Glacial Melt Cycle Could Become Self-Amplifying, Making it Difficult to Halt The Greenland ice sheet can experience extreme melting even when temperatures don’t hit record highs, according to a new analysis by Dr. Marco Tedesco, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York. His findings suggest that glaciers could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming that would be difficult to halt. “We are finding that...
New evidence of sea-level oscillations during a warm period that started about 125,000 years ago raises the possibility of a similar scenario if the planet continues its more recent warming trend, says a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). In a paper published online in the Sept. 11 Nature Geoscience, the researchers report data from an improved method of dating fossil coral reef skeletons in the Bahamas. By calculating more accurate ages for the...
An Update from NASA's Sea Level Sentinels: Like mercury in a thermometer, ocean waters expand as they warm. This, along with melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, drives sea levels higher over the long term. For the past 18 years, the U.S./French Jason-1, Jason-2 and Topex/Poseidon spacecraft have been monitoring the gradual rise of the world's ocean in response to global warming. While the rise of the global ocean has been remarkably steady for most of this...
WASHINGTON, Aug. 18, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA-funded researchers have created the first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica. The map, which shows glaciers flowing thousands of miles from the continent's deep interior to its coast, will be critical for tracking future sea-level increases from climate change. The team created the map using integrated radar observations from a consortium of international satellites. (Logo:...
Latest Sea level Reference Libraries
The sea levels all around the world are rising. Current sea-level rise has the potential to affect human populations and the natural environment. Two key factors have contributed to the observed sea level rise. The first is thermal expansion: as the ocean water warms, it expands. The second is from the influence of land-based ice because of increased melting. The major store of water on land is found in the glaciers and the ice sheets. The rising of sea levels is one of several lines of...
A radar altimeter measures altitude above the terrain beneath an aircraft as opposed to a barometric altimeter which provides the distance above a pre-determined datum, usually sea level. Radar is the underpinning principle of the system. Radio waves that are reflected back from the ground are timed in order to calculate speed, distance, and time which are related to the each other and can be used to calculate the distance from one point to another. Lloyd Espenschied invented the radar...
