Sea level rise to be less severe - study

By: ALISTER DOYLE

OSLO – A melt of ice on Greenland and Antarctica is likely to be less severe than expected this century, limiting sea level rise to a maximum of 69 cm (27 inches), an international study said on Tuesday.

Even so, such a rise could dramatically change coastal environments in the lifetimes of people born today with ever more severe storm surges and erosion, according to the ice2sea project by 24, mostly European, scientific institutions.
Some scientific studies have projected sea level rise of up to two metres by 2100, a figure that UN Secretary-General Ban ki-moon has called a worst case that would swamp large tracts of land from Bangladesh to Florida.
Ice2sea, a four-year project to narrow down uncertainties of how melting ice will pour water into the oceans, found that sea levels would rise by between 16.5 and 69 cm under a scenario of moderate global warming this century.
“This is good news” for those who have feared sharper rises, David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey who led the ice2sea project, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“But 69 cm is a very real impact ... it changes the frequency of floods significantly,” he said. And seas would keep rising for centuries beyond 2100, in a threat to coastal cities and low-lying islands such as the Maldives or Tuvalu.
Ice2sea said a thaw of Antarctica, Greenland and glaciers from the Alps to the Andes would contribute between 3.5 and 36.8 cm to sea level rise this century. The fact that water expands as it warms would add another 13 to 32 cm, Vaughan said.
Some other scientists disputed ice2sea’s projections.
“I think the numbers are too low,” Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an ice expert and professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, told Reuters. She said ice2sea wrongly assumed a slowdown in the rate of ice discharge from Greenland. – Nampa-Reuters

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