Ice Melt Means Uneven Sea Level Rise Around the World

LONDON – Scientists say the sea level rise caused by climate change during the rest of this century will not affect all parts of the world equally, because of the ways sea, land and ice interact.

They say parts of the Pacific are likely to see the highest rise. This region is where many low-lying island countries most vulnerable to sea level rise, like the Seychelles, are already struggling. Their peoples will need evacuation if the scientists’ high-end predictions are correct. Northern Europe, on the other hand, will experience a below-average increase.

Researchers have found that ice melt from glaciers and from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is likely to be critically important to regional sea-level change in the equatorial Pacific ocean.
Credit: Christine Zenino via Climate News Network.

The team, from Italy’s University of Urbino and the University of Bristol, U.K., report their findings in a paper, The gravitationally consistent sea-level fingerprint of future terrestrial ice loss, published in Geophysical Research Letters online.

Scientists have known for some time that sea level rise around the globe will not be uniform. The team investigated how ice loss will continue to add to rising sea levels until the year 2100. The researchers, from the European Union’s Ice2sea project, show in detail the global pattern of sea level rise that would result from two scenarios of ice-loss from glaciers and ice sheets.

Improved projections of the contribution of ice to sea level rise produced by Ice2sea will feed into the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2007, the IPCC’s fourth report highlighted ice-sheets as the most significant remaining uncertainty in projections of sea-level rise.

The researchers found that ice melt from glaciers and from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is likely to be critically important to regional sea-level change in the equatorial Pacific ocean.

Legacy of the Ice Age

There the rise will be greater than the global average increase, affecting in particular western Australia, Oceania and the small atolls and islands in the region, including Hawaii. Another area which should expect an above-average increase is the east coast of South Africa and Madagascar.

The study focussed on three effects that lead to the unequal distribution of sea level rise. First, land is both subsiding into and emerging from the sea because of a massive ice loss at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, when billions of tonnes of ice covering parts of North America and Europe melted.

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