Researchers predict that each degree of global warming will cause sea levels to rise by 2.3 meters and that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be the major contributors
Greenhouse gas emissions have been the chief cause of global warming. Researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research now predict that this global warming will also be the cause of rise in sea levels globally. According to their predictions, each degree Celsius of global warming will cause sea levels to rise by 2.3 meters.
Thermal expansion of the ocean and melting mountain glaciers have been the two driving forces behind the rising sea levels but researchers say that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be the dominant contributors within the next two millennia.
"CO2, once emitted by burning fossil fuels, stays an awful long time in the atmosphere," said Anders Levermann, lead author of the study and research domain co-chair at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in a press release. "Consequently, the warming it causes also persists." The oceans and ice sheets are slow in responding, simply because of their enormous mass, which is why observed sea-level rise is now measured in millimeters per year. "The problem is: once heated out of balance, they simply don't stop," says Levermann. "We're confident that our estimate is robust because of the combination of physics and data that we use."
Ice sheets are rapidly disappearing due to rise in temperatures. This has given rise to the need for continuous satellite monitoring of ice melts in order to better identify and predict melting and corresponding sea level rise. The Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets account for over 99.5 percent of the Earth's glacier ice. Over the last few years, scientists have noticed these ice sheets melting at an abnormally rapid rate. To get a better picture of the rapid melt, the researchers compared nine years of satellite data from the GRACE mission with reconstructions of about 50 years of mass changes to the ice sheet. They found that ice sheets are losing substantial amounts of ice, about 300 billion tons each year. This rate is continuously rising, reveals Bert Wouters, a visiting researcher at the University of Colorado, in a news release.
World Bank official Robert Bisset predicts a sea level rise of as much as 50 centimeters by the 2050s. Scientists predict more intense tropical storms, food shortages, dangerous heat waves, and eventually flooding that could render coastal areas uninhabitable.
