{"id":20486,"date":"2016-05-07T20:02:22","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T01:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20486"},"modified":"2016-05-07T20:02:22","modified_gmt":"2016-05-08T01:02:22","slug":"abrupt-sea-level-rise-looms-as-increasingly-realistic-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20486","title":{"rendered":"Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/feature\/abrupt_sea_level_rise_realistic_greenland_antarctica\/2990\/\">Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms\u00a0As Increasingly Realistic Threat<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"dek\"><em>Ninety-nine percent of the planet&#8217;s freshwater ice is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Now, a growing number of studies are raising the possibility that as those ice sheets melt, sea levels could rise by six feet this century, and far higher in the next, flooding many of the world&#8217;s populated coastal areas.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/images\/features\/Antarctica_ChristopherMichelFlickr_KB.jpg\" width=\"450\" height=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"credit\">Christopher Michel\/Flickr<\/div>\n<div class=\"caption\">West Antarctica\u2019s glaciers and floating ice shelves are becoming increasingly unstable.<\/div>\n<div class=\"caption\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"caption\">Last month in Greenland, more than a tenth of the ice sheet\u2019s surface was melting in the unseasonably warm spring sun, smashing 2010\u2019s record for a thaw so early in the year. In the Antarctic, warm water licking at the base of the continent\u2019s western ice sheet is, in effect, dissolving the cork that holds back the flow of glaciers into the sea; ice is now seeping like wine from a toppled bottle.<\/div>\n<p>The planet\u2019s polar ice is melting fast, and recent satellite data, models, and fieldwork have left scientists sobered by the speed of the sea level rise we should expect over the coming decades. Although researchers have long projected that the planet\u2019s biggest ice sheets and glaciers will wilt in the face of rising temperatures, estimates of the rate of that change keep going up. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out its last report in 2013, the consensus was for under a meter (3.3 feet) of sea level rise by 2100. In just the last few years, at least one modeling study suggests we might need to double that.<\/p>\n<p>Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine says that study underscores the possible speed of ice sheet melt and collapse. \u201cOnce these processes start to kick in,\u201d he says, \u201cthey\u2019re very fast.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms\u00a0As Increasingly Realistic Threat Ninety-nine percent of the planet&#8217;s freshwater ice is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Now, a growing number of studies are raising the possibility that as those ice sheets melt, sea levels could rise by six feet this century, and far higher in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2756,2196,13754,13752,7514,7567,13753,7163],"class_list":["post-20486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-antarctica","tag-greenland","tag-ice-caps","tag-nicola-jones","tag-sea-level-rise","tag-sea-levels","tag-threat","tag-yale-environment-360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20487,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20486\/revisions\/20487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}