Emissions of greenhouse gases could cause sea levels to rise by more than 15 inches, scientists have concluded, using NASA data to give a strong warning about melting ice sheets. This huge increase would lead to dramatic flooding in coastal areas around the world, and the potential revelation of the results would generate a chain reaction.
Earth’s warming conditions are already being blamed for the melting of existing ice, and rising sea levels. However, further melting remains to be considered, according to the Ice Sheet Model Intercompression Project (ISMIP6) led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
It featured more than 60 experts on ice, ocean and atmospheric research – three dozen different international organizations from around the world – working together to figure out what would happen if the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melted. The results of two studies published in The Cryosphere Journal make for inauspicious reading.
By the year 2100, they concluded, and if greenhouse emissions were reduced from their current levels, melting the combined ice sheet could increase global sea levels by more than 15-inches. It is believed that meltwater from this ice sheet increases to one third of the total global sea surface. Previous studies suggest that, even if we change now, sea levels will rise by about a quarter-inch by 2100.
“The biggest uncertainty about how much sea level will rise in the future is how much the ice sheets will contribute,” said Sophie Noviki, now at the University of Buffalo and at NASA’s Goddard, and project leader. The study, said today. “And how much the ice sheets contribute really depends on what the climate will do.”
The challenge is that the ice sheets at the North and South Poles have a dual effect of shrinking, and a large amount of water is released in the process. On the one hand, the air temperature is rising, which melts the ice of the surface layer. At the same time, sea temperatures are also rising, causing glaciers to shrink and retreat. A study in August Gust predicted that the Antarctic could be prone to unexpectedly unpredictable ice sheets, a dramatic increase in the speed at which ice melts in the process.
Two possibilities have been explored in this recent study. On the positive side, the team created a low-emission scenario, where carbon emissions dropped dramatically. However, global sea levels rose by about 1.3 inches.
The second model, Dale, took a more pessimistic view, where emissions increased slightly in an attempt to check their output. There, they concluded, the ice sheets melted about an inch into the already rising oceans. inches inches can be added.
Lending more complexity is the fact that changes and melting rates are not consistent in all areas. Some regions are more sensitive to differences in warm oceans and currents: the Amundsen Sea region in West Antarctica, for example, and the Wilkes Land in East Antarctica, for example, are shown to be the most sensitive to changes in simulation.
“With these new results, we can focus our efforts in the right direction and learn what needs to be done next to improve estimates,” explains ice scientist Helen Serosey, an ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Is.
