Can Sea Level Rise Be Stopped?
Perhaps the two most important questions about rising sea level are, how bad could it get in coming decades and can it be stopped? A lot of my writing recently has dealt with the range and uncertainty of how high we should plan. It seems timely to get back to the basis issue of why it will not likely be stopped anytime “soon” meaning centuries.
The height of the global ocean primarily changes due to the increase or decrease in the amount of ice on land, 98% of which is on Antartica and Greenland. When the world is warmer there is less ice, higher sea level and less land. The reverse is true as well. Normally the natural pattern of the “ice ages” plays out over thousands of years. The chart, updated for my new book, shows global mean sea level and global mean temperature in blue and red, with a full cycle being roughly 100,000 years. There can be a lag time of years before the parallel movement is discernible, but the correlation of warmer planet, less ice, higher sea level is as basic as the melting point of ice. On a timescale of centuries and millennia
