New estimates suggest sea level rise will reach a high of 1.8 meters at worst.
Climate change is causing the sea levels to rise by melting sea ice such as the giant sheets of Greaanland and Antarctica, the University of Copenhagen reported. Groundwater pumped for drinking and agricultural use can end up in the oceans. As the atmospheric temperature rises water also expands and takes up more space.
In 2013 the U.N's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report estimating future sea levels, but was not able to come up with an upper limit for sea level rise.
"We wanted to try to calculate an upper limit for the rise in sea level and the biggest question is the melting of the ice sheets and how quickly this will happen. The IPCC restricted their projektions to only using results based on models of each process that contributes to sea level. But the greatest uncertainty in assessing the evolution of sea levels is that ice sheet models have only a limited ability to capture the key driving forces in the dynamics of the ice sheets in relation to climatic impact," Aslak Grinsted, Associate Professor at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Grinsted worked with researchers from England and China to come up with these new calculations. The team combined IPCC data with other information published within the ice-sheet expert community tp determine the risk of collapse in pars of Antarctica and how dramatic those events would be.
"We have created a picture of the propable limits for how much global sea levels will rise in this century. Our calculations show that the seas will likely rise around 80 [centimeters]. An increase of more than 180 cm has a likelihood of less than 5 percent. We find that a rise in sea levels of more than 2 meters is improbable," Grinsted said.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Environmental Research Letters.
