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If humans continue to emit greenhouse gases at the current rate, global sea levels could rise more than 15 inches (38 centimeters) by 2100, scientists found in a new study.
Greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, such as carbon dioxide, contribute significantly to climate change and warming temperatures on planet Earth, studies continue to show. As things heat up, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting. A new study by an international team of more than 60 ice, ocean and atmosphere scientists estimates how much these melting ice sheets will contribute to global sea level.
“One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to how much sea level will rise in the future is how much the ice sheets will contribute,” said project leader and ice scientist Sophie Nowicki, now at the University of Buffalo and previously at the NASA’s Goddard spaceflight. Center in Maryland, it said in a statement. “And the contribution of the ice sheets really depends on what the climate will do.”
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The results of this study show that, if human greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the melting ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica will contribute more than 15 inches (28 centimeters) to global sea level. This new study is part of the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6), which is led by NASA Goddard.
The ISMIP6 team investigated how sea level will rise between 2015 and 2100, exploring how sea level will change under a variety of carbon emission scenarios.
They found that with high emissions (as we see now) spreading over this time period, Greenland’s melting ice sheet will contribute about 3.5 inches (9 cm) to global sea level rise. . With lower emissions, they estimate that number to be about 1.3 inches (3 cm).
The loss of the ice sheet in Antarctica is a bit more difficult to predict because, while ice shelves will continue to erode on the western side of the continent, East Antarctica could gain mass as temperatures rise due to rising The snowfall. Because of this, the team found a wider range of possible ice sheet loss here.
The team determined that ice sheet loss in Antarctica could raise sea levels by as much as 12 inches (30 cm), and West Antarctica caused up to 7.1 inches (18 cm) of sea level rise by 2100. with the highest expected emissions.
However, to be clear: these increases in global sea levels are only predictions for the years 2015 to 2100, so they do not take into account the significant loss of ice sheet that has already taken place between the pre-industrial era and the actuality.
“The Amundsen Sea region in West Antarctica and the Wilkes Land in East Antarctica are the two regions most sensitive to warming ocean temperatures and changing currents, and will continue to lose large amounts of ice,” said Helene Seroussi. , an ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. in Southern California, who led the modeling of the Antarctic ice sheet in the ISMIP6 project, said in the same statement.
“With these new results, we can focus our efforts in the right direction and know what to work on to continue to improve projections,” Seroussi said.
These results are in line with estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose 2019 Special Report on the Oceans and Cryosphere showed that melting ice sheets would contribute to about a third of total global sea level rise.
According to the 2019 IPCC report, the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland will contribute 3.1 to 10.6 inches (8 to 27 cm) to global sea level rise between 2000 and 2100. For Antarctica , the report estimates that the melting of the ice sheets will add up to 1.2 to 11 inches (3 to 28 cm).
The results of this new work will help inform the next IPCC report, the sixth overall, to be released in 2022, according to the same statement.
“The strength of ISMIP6 was to bring together most of the ice sheet modeling groups from around the world and then connect with other communities of oceanic and atmospheric modelers as well, to better understand what might happen to ice sheets,” said Heiko Goelzer, a scientist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands who is now at the Norwegian Research Center NORCE in Norway, said in the same statement.
“It took more than six years of workshops and teleconferences with scientists from around the world who worked on modeling the ice sheet, atmosphere and oceans to build a community that was finally able to improve our projections of sea level rise.” added Nowicki, who led Greenland’s ISMIP6 Ice Sheet Project. “The reason it worked is because the polar community is small, and we are all very interested in solving this future sea level problem. We need to know these numbers.”
This work was Posted on September 17 in a special issue of The Cryosphere magazine.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
