Scientists used computer modeling to get accurate estimates of sea level rises. But scientists now think they have a more accurate picture of just how much global sea levels will increase, after estimating the volume of water than will come from the melting of our planet’s two ice sheets, per DailyMail.
Previous studies have already reported that Earth’s two ice sheets are melting.
Together, the Antarctic Ice Sheet and Greenland Ice Sheet – the two biggest sources of melting ice – contain about 99 per cent of the freshwater on Earth.
In a worst-case scenario, melted water from Antarctic Ice Sheet in the south and Greenland Ice Sheet in the north will add an extra 4.6 feet to sea levels by the year 2150, the new study claims.
Alarming though this may be, it doesn’t even account for other sources of rising sea levels, such as ice caps and floating platforms of ice that have melted, too.
Global mean sea level has risen by about 7.8 inches (20cm) in the past century and this trend is likely to accelerate with global warming, the researchers say.
The new study was led by Jun-Young Park at Pusan National University in South Korea and Fabian Schloesser at the University of Hawaii.
‘With a considerable fraction of the world’s population living near coastlines, it is crucial to provide accurate projections of global and regional future sea level trends,’ they say in their paper, published yesterday in Nature Communications.
‘Our results demonstrate that estimates of future sea-level rise fundamentally depend on the complex interactions between ice-sheets, icebergs, ocean and the atmosphere.’
The new research focused on water coming from melted ice sheets — large areas of land covered in ice that are bigger than 19,000 square miles (those less than this are called ice caps).
Ice sheets are very chunky – the Antarctic one is about 1.2 miles thick – but previous studies have suggested they are both losing mass due to climate change as the air and ocean waters get warmer.
Although ice melted from the two ice sheets aren’t the only cause of rising sea levels, they are thought to be the biggest sources.
Others include ice caps and floating platforms of ice, as well as thermal expansion, land sinkage and more.
For the new study, the experts performed climate modelling simulations based on the latest Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).
These modelling scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show different ways in which the world could change and are frequently used by researchers.
