Topic
A long-term rise in global sea levels caused by melting ice sheets, glaciers, and thermal expansion of seawater. Local effects depend on tides and storms.
Thwaites Glacier kept losing ice for all 150 simulated years in three models with ocean melting set to zero, New Scientist reports. The setup is physically impossible, so it shows the glacier's momentum but not how much sea level will rise.
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UC Irvine and JPL glaciologists project up to 30 mm of Thwaites sea-level rise by 2100, twice earlier estimates, even with no added warming. Replacing the grounding line with a grounding zone made the model's reconstruction of past change four times more pronounced.
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Caroline Needell's team found the tallest glacier cliffs retreating faster than models predict, yet none showed unstable retreat in satellite data. That moves the sea-level question to whether faster flow can thin the cliffs before they fail.
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A WHOI-led team tested marine ice-cliff instability against 15,330 satellite observations and reports limits to rapid retreat in Science. The data set gives modelers a global test for a mechanism that has never been directly observed.
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Virginia Tech modelers ran 90 synthetic storms against 2050 sea levels and found the Chesapeake Bay damps storm surge less than it does today. The size of that loss is worded in a way that supports two readings.
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University of Virginia researchers counted more than 260 million dead trees within 10 km of US coasts and Great Lakes shores in 2012-2023 aerial images. How much forest carbon that costs depends on what grows in the dead trees' place, a University of Plymouth researcher said.
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Researchers warn an internal Kelvin wave from this year's super El Niño could lift California sea levels by up to 30 cm once it reaches the coast. The raised water would add to winter storm surges, though the oceanographer quoted expects it to distort tides for weeks.
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Shorebird researchers reviewed 37 published studies and found 21 that predict rising seas will shrink or degrade the birds' coastal habitat. They trace much of that loss to coastal squeeze, where dikes and seawalls stop beaches and marshes from retreating inland as the water rises.
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Kiel and AWI researchers imaged a 580-cubic-kilometre sediment wedge off East Antarctica that records ice halting its retreat and advancing about 65 km. The authors link the stall partly to the seafloor itself, so ice-sheet models now have a site where simulated retreat has to pause and push back.
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NC State satellite mapping shows North Carolina lost 21% of its coastal forest, about 64,220 hectares, between 1985 and 2021, mostly to rising seas. Measured per year, conversion to marsh, ghost forest and shrub after 2010 ran at about triple the earlier pace.
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Researchers from 14 countries say the Wilkes Basin's ice could raise seas 3 to 4 meters, though its pace of retreat and its trigger are still unknown. Until someone measures the sea floor and ocean at its glacier fronts, the basin's share of future sea-level rise cannot be dated.
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Researchers writing in Nature Geoscience give at least 89% odds that the strictest Paris path costs Antarctica less ice by 2100 than very high emissions. For coastal planners, that puts part of Antarctica's future contribution to sea level within reach of emissions policy.
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University of Bonn geodesists mapped ocean warming basin by basin and found gaps from climate model simulations in the double-digit percentage range. The comparison covers the recent past, so whether regional projections carry the same error is still untested.
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Researchers screening hundreds of thousands of simulated futures in Nature Geoscience find Antarctica loses ice on net this century, even at 1.5C of warming. In the runs that survive, extra snowfall does not outweigh the loss, so Antarctica adds to sea-level rise this century.
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Atlantic City's water in the late-September nor'easter hit its highest level since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, as peak surge met a full-moon high tide. A storm researcher calls the El Niño outlook unclear, but rising seas alone will make equally strong storms more damaging.
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Osaka's ground is rising about 4 millimetres a year on average, and up to 12 in places, after Japan's early-1960s curbs on groundwater pumping. At that average pace, regaining the 2 metres or more some districts sank would take at least 500 years.
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Researchers reviewing East Antarctica's Wilkes Subglacial Basin say its ice would raise seas 3 to 4 metres if it all melted. The basin shrank sharply in past climates 2 to 3 degrees warmer, yet too little ocean data exists to project how fast it could retreat now.
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The August berg was the largest Arctic calving since 2020, but it broke along a fracture the team watching Petermann had not expected, leaving two rifts that together outline more than twice the area that left.
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The IMBIE team merged 42 independent satellite surveys from 27 missions to account for 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica since 1979, and it assigns 84% of that loss to glaciers accelerating into the ocean.
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CIRES scientists measured a Petermann Ice Shelf river cutting below sea level to form an estuary that came and went from 2014 to 2018. A co-author suspects that cycle weakened the shelf ahead of its Manhattan-sized calving in August, though the imagery ends eight years earlier.
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