Study
Reveals Scary New Facts About Sea Level Rise estimates of sea level
rise
A
new study from scientists at Harvard and Rutgers Universities has
been sweeping the internet, and for good reason: it shows,
quite alarmingly, that the planet’s seas have been rising much
faster than we thought.
15
January, 2015
The
research can be confusing on its face. At first glance, it shows that
scientists have actually been overstating the
rate of sea level rise for the first 90 years of the 20th century.
Instead of rising about six inches over that period of time, the
Harvard and Rutgers scientists discovered that the sea actually only
rose by about five inches. That’s a big overstatement — a two
quadrillion gallon overstatement, in fact — enough to fill three
billion Olympic-size swimming pools, the New
York Times reported.
But
here’s the thing. If the sea wasn’t rising as steadily as we
believed from 1900 to 1990, that means that it has been rising much
more quickly than we thought from 1990 to the present day. In other
words, we used to think the rate of acceleration of sea level rise in
the last 25 years was only a little worse compared to the past —
now that we know the rate used to be much slower, we know that it’s
much worse.
This
chart shows as estimate of global sea level side from four different
analyses, shown in red, blue, purple, and black. Shaded regions show
uncertainty.
CREDIT:
NATURE
“What
this paper shows is that the sea-level acceleration over the past
century has been greater than had been estimated by others,” lead
writer Eric Morrow said
in a statement.
“It’s a larger problem than we initially thought.”
Specifically,
previous research had stated the seas rose about two-thirds of an
inch per decade between 1900 and 1990. But with the new study, that
rate was recalculated to less than half an inch a decade. Both old
and new research say that since 1990, the ocean has been rising at
about 1.2 inches a decade, meaning the gap is much wider than
previously thought.
Most
scientists believe that the main driver of sea level rise is the
thermal expansion of warming oceans and the melting of the world’s
ice sheets and mountain glaciers, two phenomena driven by global
warming. Antarctica, for example, is losing
land ice at
an accelerating rate. In December, scientists discovered that
a West Antarctic ice sheet roughly the size of Texas is losing the
amount of ice equivalent to Mount Everest every two years,
representing a melt rate that has tripled over the last decade.
The
common skeptic argument is that while Antarctica is losing land ice,
it is actually gaining sea ice. While that’s true, sea ice melt
does not affect sea level rise. It’s like an ice cube in a glass —
if it melts, nothing happens. Up north in the Arctic, however, the
loss of sea ice is just as important to look at, because when it
melts, more sunlight is absorbed by the oceans. In Antarctica, sea
ice melt is less
of a problem for
ocean warmth.
In
addition, tropical glaciers in the Andes Mountains are melting,
threatening freshwater supplies in South America. Some scientists
have also
predicted that
the Greenland Ice Sheet — which covers about 80 percent of the
massive country — is approaching a “tipping point” that could
also have “huge implications” for global sea levels and ocean
carbon dioxide absorption.
“We
know the sea level is changing for a variety of reasons,” study
co-author Carling Hay said.
“There are ongoing effects due to the last ice age, heating and
expansion of the ocean due to global warming, changes in ocean
circulation, and present-day melting of land-ice, all of which result
in unique patterns of sea-level change.”
All
that may seem pretty grim, but there is a least one good thing to
come out of the research — a new and hopefully more accurate method
for measuring sea level rise. Before this study, scientists estimated
global sea level by essentially dropping long yard sticks into
different points of the ocean, and then averaging out the
measurements to see if the ocean rose or fell.
For
this study, Morrow and Hay attempted to use the data from how
individual ice sheets contribute to global sea-level rise, and how
ocean circulation is changing to inform their measurements. If the
method proves to be better, it could serve to, as the New
York Times put
it, “increase scientists’ confidence that they understand
precisely why the ocean is rising — and therefore shore up their
ability to project future increases.”
Correcting
estimates of sea level rise
The
acceleration in global sea level from the 20th century to the last
two decades has been significantly larger than scientists previously
thought, according to a new study. Previous estimates of global
sea-level rise from 1900-1990 had been over-estimated by as much as
30 percent, researchers suggest.
14
January, 2015
The
acceleration in global sea level from the 20th century to the last
two decades has been significantly larger than scientists previously
thought, according to a new Harvard study.
The
study, co-authored by Carling Hay, a post-doctoral fellow in the
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), and Eric Morrow, a
recent PhD graduate of EPS, shows that previous estimates of global
sea-level rise from 1900-1990 had been over-estimated by as much as
30 percent. The report, however, confirms previous estimates of
sea-level change since 1990, suggesting that the rate of sea-level
change is increasing more quickly than previously believed. The new
work is described in a January 14 paper published in Nature.
"What
this paper shows is that sea-level acceleration over the past
century has been greater than had been estimated by others,"
Morrow said. "It's a larger problem than we initially thought."
"Scientists
now believe that most of the world's ice sheets and mountain
glaciers are melting in response to rising temperatures." Hay
added. "Melting ice sheets cause global mean sea level to rise.
Understanding this contribution is critical in a warming world."
Previous
estimates had placed sea-level rise at between 1.5 and 1.8
millimeters annually over the 20th century. Hay and Morrow, however,
suggest that from 1901 until 1990, the figure was closer to 1.2
millimeters per year. But everyone agrees that global sea level has
risen by about 3 millimeters annually since that time, and so the
new study points to a larger acceleration in global sea level.
"Another
concern with this is that many efforts to project sea-level change
into the future use estimates of sea level over the time period from
1900 to 1990," Morrow said. "If we've been over-estimating
the sea-level change during that period, it means that these models
are not calibrated appropriately, and that calls into question the
accuracy of projections out to the end of the 21st century."
To
obtain their improved estimate of 20th century global sea level, Hay
and Morrow approached the challenge of estimating sea-level rise
from a completely new perspective.
Typically,
Hay said, estimates of sea-level rise are created by dividing the
world's oceans into sub-regions, and gathering records from tide
gauges -- essentially yard-sticks used to measure ocean tides --
from each area. Using records that contain the most complete data,
researchers average them together to create estimates of sea level
for each region, then average those rates together to create a
global estimate.
"But
these simple averages aren't representative of a true global mean
value" Hay explained. "Tide gauges are located along
coasts, therefore large areas of the ocean aren't being included in
these estimates. And the records that do exist commonly have large
gaps."
"Part
of the problem is related to the sparsity of these records, even
along the coastlines," Morrow said. "It wasn't until the
1950s that there began to be more global coverage of these
observations, and earlier estimates of global mean sea-level change
across the 20th century were biased by that sparsity."
"We
know the sea level is changing for a variety of reasons," Hay
said. "There are ongoing effects due to the last ice age,
heating and expansion of the ocean due to global warming, changes in
ocean circulation, and present-day melting of land-ice, all of which
result in unique patterns of sea-level change. These processes
combine to produce the observed global mean sea-level rise."
The
new estimates developed by Hay and Morrow grew out of a separate
project aimed at modeling the physics that underpin sea-level
"fingerprints" -- explainer from previous story.
"What
we were interested in -- and remain interested in -- was whether we
can detect the sea-level fingerprints we predicted in our computer
simulations in sea-level records," Morrow said. "Using a
global set of observations, our goal has been to infer how
individual ice sheets are contributing to global sea-level rise."
The
challenge, Hay said, is that doing so requires working with a "very
noisy, sparse records."
"We
have to account for ice age signals, and we have to understand how
ocean circulation patterns are changing and how thermal expansion is
contributing to both regional patterns and the global mean,"
she explained. "We try to correct for all those signals using
our simulations and statistical methods, then look at what's left
and see if it fits with the patterns we expect to see from different
ice sheets."
"We
are looking at all the available sea-level records and trying to say
that Greenland has been melting at this rate, the Arctic at this
rate, the Antarctic at this rate, etc." she continued. "We
then sum these contributions and add in the rate that the oceans are
changing due to thermal expansion to estimate a rate of global mean
sea-level change."
To
their surprise, Hay said, it quickly became clear that previous
estimates of sea-level rise over most of the 20th century were too
high.
"We
expected that we would estimate the individual contributions, and
that their sum would get us back to the 1.5 to 1.8 mm per year that
other people had predicted," Hay said. "But the math
doesn't work out that way. Unfortunately, our new lower rate of
sea-level rise prior to 1990 means that the sea-level acceleration
that resulted in higher rates over the last 20 years is really much
larger than anyone thought."
Story
Source:
The
above story is based on materials provided
by Harvard
University.
The original article was written by Peter Reuell. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal
Reference:
- Carling C. Hay, Eric Morrow, Robert E. Kopp & Jerry X. Mitrovica. Probabilistic reanalysis of twentieth-century sea-level rise. Nature, January 2015 DOI:10.1038/nature14093
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