NASA Links Port-City Sea Levels to Regional Ice Melt

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new NASA tool links changes in sea level in 293 global port cities to specific regions of melting land ice, such as southern Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. It is intended to help coastal planners prepare for rising seas in the decades to come.

new NASA tool links changes in sea level in 293 global port cities to specific regions of melting land ice, such as southern Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. It is intended to help coastal planners prepare for rising seas in the decades to come.

All coastal cities will see some impacts of global sea level rise. But the new tool shows that, for example, New York City is more strongly affected by melting ice in northeastern Greenland than in southwestern Greenland; while Sydney has a greater risk from the rapidly melting Antarctic Peninsula than from East Antarctica.

A paper describing the new tool, titled "Should coastal planners have concern over where land ice is melting?" was recently published in the journal Science Advances. The research team is Eric Larour, Erik Ivins and Surendra Adhikari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Read more at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) 

Image: The contribution of melting ice in Greenland to sea level rise in New York City (inset). Red indicates the greatest sea level contribution, blue is the smallest to no contribution. A new NASA tool lets users research the contributions of all regions of global land ice to sea levels in 293 port cities.

Data image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Google. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons