NASA’s former climate chief, James Hansen, is lead author on a paper that predicts rapidly rising seas this century, but not all climate scientists believe the study’s models are convincing.
Immersion in seawater kills sea turtle eggs, suggesting that sea turtles are increasingly at risk from rising seas, according to research published today in Royal Society Open Science.
Raise the (Thames) Barriers!
diamond geezer/Flickr
With the sea level set to rise up to 1m by 2100, cities around the world must adapt, if they’re to avoid disaster.
Acehnese fishers are among the quarter of the world’s population who live on the coast, and for whom climate-driven changes to the oceans would make life much harder.
Hotli Simanjuntak/EPA/AAP Image
Failing to stick to the world’s agreed global warming limit of 2C won’t just affect the atmosphere - it will play havoc with the oceans too, potentially ruining ecosystems on which much of humanity depends.
OK, but which sea’s level? And how do you know what it is?
Wally Gobetz
The tides come in, the tides come out. But what is a sea’s level? Technology has evolved since we first started gauging the height of the ocean in comparison to the land.
Every year millions of birds migrate between Australia and the northern Hemisphere.
Mdk572/Wikimedia
Five million shorebirds migrate between Australia and the northern hemisphere, threatened by habitat destruction, and rising seas. How can we protect this natural marvel?
Rising sea levels are one of the clearest and most widespread manifestations of climate change.
Steven Godfrey
Since 1993, satellites have been used as well as tidal gauges to monitor sea level. A new calibration of this satellite record now shows that the rise in sea level is gathering pace.
With sea levels rising, a managed retreat from the coastline is necessary.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook
In areas vulnerable to sea level rise and storm surges, developments are at increasing risk of inundation and permanent damage over coming years.
The Totten Glacier, the largest in East Antarctica, has deep channels running beneath it that may allow relatively warm water into its belly.
Tas van Ommen
Researchers in East Antarctica have surveyed an area the size of New South Wales to study the behaviour of the region’s biggest glacier - and the secrets below the ice that could speed up its melting.
The sea level has gone up about half of a foot since the 1960s on the southern Florida coast, making floods after storms more frequent.
siralbertus
Florida’s coastal populations and its economy face serious threats from rising sea levels caused by global climate change. The state’s response could set an example for other nations around the world.
Researchers deploy robotic Argo floats into the ocean to measure temperature.
CSIRO
The oceans are continuing to warm steadily despite an apparent slowdown in global warming at the earth’s surface, according to data collected by thousands of floating robots published today in Nature Climate…
Harvard and Rutgers scientists propose a new, potentially more accurate way, to measure the rate of sea level rise.
Shutterstock
When you ask yourself what the biggest unanswered scientific questions are, “how did sea levels change over the past 100 years?” is unlikely to appear at the top of your list. After all, haven’t we already…
Aboriginal stories say Fitzroy Island on the Great Barrier Reef was connected to the mainland. It was, at least 10,000 years ago.
Felix Dziekan/Flickr
In the beginning, as far back as we remember, our home islands were not islands at all as they are today. They were part of a peninsula that jutted out from the mainland and we roamed freely throughout…
Scarborough, Queensland: no longer allowed to factor in sea-level rise in its planning laws.
Seo75/Wikimedia Commons
Queensland Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney’s decision, revealed this week, to order a Brisbane council to remove future sea-level rise from its planning regulations seems a rather short-sighted thing to do…
King tides are just one of the threats faced by the people of Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, as a result of climate change.
Brad Marsellos
While you may have heard about the increasing threat that climate change and rising seas pose to Pacific islands — already forcing some communities to move — Australia has its own group of islands that…
A king tide in New Zealand, part of a project documenting what future sea level rise might look like.
Witness King Tides/Flickr
Human activity is driving sea levels higher. Australia’s seas are likely to rise by around 70 centimetres by 2100 if nothing is done to combat climate change. But 2100 can seem a long way off. At the moment…
Bad news for icebergs: oceans in the Southern Hemisphere have been soaking up more heat energy than previously thought.
Andrew Meijers/BAS
The upper layers of the world’s oceans have been warming much faster than oceanographers realised over the past few decades, according to a new study. Sparse sampling of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans…
Tasman Lake, which is fed by melt water from the retreating Tasman Glacier, photographed in March this year.
Trevor Chinn
Jim Salinger, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau; Blair Fitzharris, University of Otago, and Trevor Chinn, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
A third of the permanent snow and ice of New Zealand’s Southern Alps has now disappeared, according to our new research based on National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research aerial surveys. Since…
At some point, the postman will not always get through.
Dan Anderson
It is amazing for me to see the very aggressive building boom underway in south Florida; on the beaches and barrier islands, throughout downtown and in the low western areas bordering the Everglades. They…