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Sea level rise has been underestimated – new ice studies suggest

Ice melt studies say we underestimate sea level rise, Independent Australia  Peter Boyer 11 April 2016, Are melting polar ice sheets as stable as we think, or have we missed something? If a couple of new ice studies are only partly right, we face massive disruption from sea level rise within decades.

SCIENTIFIC DEBATE about this has picked up in the wake of the March publication of two major research papers by scientists from the U.S., France, Germany and China.

A paper by James Hansen and 18 other climatologists in the open-access science journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, examined ancient climate change to assess how that compares with today’s melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

It argues that during this century, ice sheet meltwater spreading over parts of the Southern Ocean and the North Atlantic will increase the temperature variation between these cooler parts and warming regions, resulting in more violent storms.

The meltwater layer also acts as a transparent lid on warming ocean waters undermining polar ice sheets sitting on bedrock below sea level. The paper’s startling prediction is that consequent disintegration could bring several metres of sea level rise within 150 years and possibly by 2070.

A paper published last week in the science journal Nature, also examining past rapid changes, looked at how the Antarctic ice sheet might react to warming of atmosphere as well as ocean, and reached similarly disturbing conclusions.

U.S. scientists Robert DeConto and David Pollard studied the puzzle of how the massive Antarctic ice sheet shed large amounts of ice over relatively short time-frames in prehistoric warming events.

Their modelling showed that if today’s high carbon emissions continue, warmer air would add to the impact of warming seas. Fracturing ice shelves and coastal cliffs would bring rapid ice loss and contribute ‘more than a metre of sea-level rise by 2100’………https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/ice-melt-studies-say-we-underestimate-sea-level-rise,8866

April 13, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | ANTARCTICA, ARCTIC, climate change