Sea level in the next 100 years

The new study shows that the sea level in the next 100 years will be one meter higher than the current sea level - three times the predictions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

New research results from a collaborative group of researchers from Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, in the UK and Finland are published in the scientific journal Climate Dynamics.

According to the multi-governmental council on global climate change UN climate change in the next century will be 2 to 4 degrees warmer than the present, but seawater will warm much slower than air and ice sheets. Greenland and Antarctica also melt more slowly. The uncertainty in the calculation of sea level rise in the future depends on the speed of ice melting in the mainland and the sea. The model predicts thawing, which underlies the prediction of the Multidisciplinary Council for Climate Change on sea level, which does not show all of the rapid changes observed in recent years. New research has therefore used another method.

Look at the direct correlation

Aslak Grinsted, geophysicist at the Ice and Climate Center at Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, explains: 'Instead of calculating based on the model of thawing, we calculated based on what was really happened in the past. We look directly at the relationship between global temperature and sea level over the past 2000 years. '

The possibility of flooding due to rain cover will increase significantly if the sea level increases by 1 meter. This sea level rise will not prevent flooding large areas of land, but the phenomenon known as high water levels will occur more than 1,000 times more often in sensitive areas. ( Photo: Council of the Northern Region, New Zealand).

With the help of the annual wood grain development and analysis from ice core drilling, researchers were able to calculate the temperature of the global climate from 2000 years ago. For about 300 years, sea level has been closely observed in several locations around the world and there is also historical knowledge of the sea level in the past in different parts of the world.

By connecting these two information flows together Aslak Grinsted can see the relationship between temperature and sea level. For example, in the Middle Ages around the 12th century, there was a warm period where the sea level was 20 cm higher than today , and so monkey 10 with the "little ice age", when the sea level is higher than today. 25 cm.

Sea level in the future

Realizing that the climate in the next century will be 3 degrees warmer, the new model predicts that the sea level will rise from 0.9 to 1.3 meters. The faster growth rate also means that thawing occurs faster than previously thought. However, experts have found that the ice will react more quickly to temperature rise than thought a few years ago. And ice age studies show that ice can melt quickly. When the ice age ended 11,700 years ago , ice melted so quickly that sea level rose 11 millimeters a year - equivalent to a meter in 100 years. In the current situation of global warming, Aslak Grinsted believes that sea level will rise at the same rate.