Revising the rise of the sea

	Columbia Glacier, Alaska Click here for more information.

By the year 2100, some models of sea level fluctuations predict a rise of two meters caused by the disintegration of Greenland and Antarctic ice. But, researchers now say that such an increase is unrealistic, and a more accurate estimate of the rise by 2100 would be somewhere between 0.8 and two meters, researchers report in the Sept. 4 issue of Science. These findings, presented by W. Pfeffer and colleagues, update current models of sea level rise. Unlike most assessments in the past that attempt to total the estimates of individual sources of ice discharge into the sea, this experiment performed by Pfeffer and colleagues involved calculating how much ice discharge from Greenland and Antarctica would be required to produce various rates of sea level rise, and then evaluating how realistic those discharge rates were. Their findings reveal that the current estimates of sea level rise by 2100 would require more discharge from Greenland and Antarctica than has ever been reported before, and while these inflated rates are not completely out of the question, the authors argue that they should not be adopted as a central working hypothesis.

ARTICLE #15: "Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise," by W.T. Pfeffer at University of Colorado in Boulder, CO; J.T. Harper at University of Montana in Bozeman, MT; S. O'Neel at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA; S. O'Neel at University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, CA.