Sea-level rises and polar ice-melting might be worse than earlier thought, a leading oceanographer has revealed.
Sea levels, rising at one millimetre a year before the industrial revolution, are now rising by three millimetres a year because of a combination of global warming, polar ice-melting and long natural cycles of sea level change.
'All indications are that it's going to get faster,' said Eric Lindstrom, head of oceanography at Nasa, at a global oceans conference in Hobart, Australia.
He also pointed to huge splits in Antarctic ice shelves in 2002, then seen as once-in-100-year events that created icebergs bigger than some small countries.
The mega icebergs were first thought not to affect global sea levels because the ice broke off from shelves already floating on the surface of the ocean.
But the disintegration of ice shelves that had blocked the flow of ice from the Antarctic continent could allow sudden flows by glaciers into the ocean, raising sea-levels.
'What we're learning is that ice isn't slow. Things can happen fast,' Mr. Lindstrom said.
'If the (polar) ice sheets really get involved, then we're talking tens of metres of sea level - that could really start to swamp low-lying countries,' he said.
A report by the UN climate panel released last month cited six models with core projections of sea level rises ranging from 28 to 43 centimetres by 2100.
© Independent Television News Limited 2007. All rights reserved.
1 comment:
You know its getting bad when a leading scientist for NASA says comment like those. It’s starting to sound like a broken record, the study that continue to come out about the problems due to global warming, when are reports going to be done about the efforts being done to prevent the inevitable. I guess that could only happen if something was being done, which doesn’t seem to be happening on a global scale!
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