The sea isn’t flat and, with a warming climate, it’s not expected to rise at the same rate everywhere. Using the science that tells us how much and how quickly it will rise is critical to making policy decisions that protect our coastal communities and our economy.
The northeastern United States is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise caused by the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the “ocean conveyor belt” that carries heat from the Caribbean to Europe. The motion of this conveyor belt maintains an uneven sea surface along the East Coast of the United States. As the planet warms, the conveyor belt will slow and that uneven surface will flatten — adding to global sea-level changes an additional, regional sea-level rise in the Northeast.
According to a 2009 review by researchers at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, state-of-the-art climate models predict that changes in the conveyor belt would cause the sea level off New York City to rise about 8 inches more than the global average this century. And now a new U.S. Geological Survey study suggests that sea level in the northeastern United States is already rising faster than the global average.
Global and regional rates of sea-level rise are expected to accelerate further as ice sheets and glaciers melt and warmer oceans expand. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 projections of between 8 and 24 inches of global sea-level rise this century are widely viewed by scientists as likely underestimates, with some researchers projecting more than a 4-foot rise. That’s without taking into account the extra sea-level rise expected in the northeastern “hot spot,” which includes New Jersey’s coast.
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