Antarctica and Greenland are melting at an alarming rate, whether scientists like to admit it or not. Entire properties might become flooded in the near future if someone doesn’t come up with a serious plan. Emitting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide at a certain level seem to represent the main culprit.
Thanks to a new study made by an international team of researchers, we have a pretty good idea of just how much the melting ice sheets will contribute to global sea levels. The predictions don’t sound too good at all.
Levels will rise more than 15 inches by 2100
Sophie Nowicki, project leader and ice scientist, declared:
One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to how much sea level will rise in the future is how much the ice sheets will contribute,
And how much the ice sheets contribute is really dependent on what the climate will do.
This new study belongs to the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6), and it’s led by NASA Goddard. The ISMIP6 team analyzed how sea levels will rise between 2015 and 2100, and they predicted how these levels will change considering several carbon-emission scenarios.
The team says that with high emissions like those from the present and extending until 2011, the melting ice sheet of Greenland will contribute with around 3.5 in (9 cm) to the global sea level rise. But if lower emissions will unfold themselves, the estimated number will be about 1.3 in (3 cm).
Whether we like it or not, nature doesn’t seem to care about our wishes, as things can become even grimmer than they already are. Scientists from Leeds and Edinburgh universities and University College London provide new conclusions after analyzing glaciers for a long time. They discovered that 28 trillions of ice melt in only 23 years. These researchers involved also confirmed that melting glaciers and ice sheets can cause sea levels to rise very high.
