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Earth

Ocean Levels Rise to a 30-Year High - and Faster Than Expected (go.com) 52

Posted by EditorDavid from the fit-to-be-tide dept.
The Washington Post reports: Oceans last year reached their highest levels in three decades — with the rate of global sea level rise increasing around 35% higher than expected, according to a NASA-led analysis published Thursday... Last year's rate of average global sea level rise was 0.23 inches per year, higher than the expected 0.17 inches per year, NASA said in a news release.

The rate of global sea level rise follows a trend of rapidly increasing rates over the past 30 years. From 1993 to 2023, the rate of global sea level rise doubled, increasing from 0.08 inches per year to 0.18 inches, another NASA-led study showed. Overall, the global sea level has climbed by 4 inches since 1993.
More details from ABC News: Climate change was a major driver to an unexpected level of sea level rise in 2024, according to a new NASA analysis... The majority of the difference between predicted and actual sea level rise was attributed to thermal expansion — or the ocean waters expanding as they warm, researchers said. An unusual amount of ocean warming, combined with meltwater from land-based ice such as glaciers, led to the increase of sea level rise last year, according to NASA.

About two-thirds of sea level rise in recent years has resulted from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, with a third coming from thermal expansion, according to NASA. In 2024, those metrics flipped, with two-thirds of the rise attributed to expanding ocean water and one-third attributed to contributions from melting ice. "With 2024 as the warmest year on record, Earth's expanding oceans are following suit, reaching their highest levels in three decades," said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of physical oceanography programs and the Integrated Earth System Observatory at NASA... Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels, climate research shows.

Ocean Levels Rise to a 30-Year High - and Faster Than Expected More | Reply

Ocean Levels Rise to a 30-Year High - and Faster Than Expected

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  • SIlver lining (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deal In One ( 6459326 ) on Sunday March 16, 2025 @07:39AM (#65237699)

    Well, the silver lining is, if you can afford currently cheaper land / property just abit inland, and a couple of metres higher from sea level, you will find that it will become expensive sea view / beach view property in a few years time. /s

    • No real SIlver lining (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Sunday March 16, 2025 @10:16AM (#65237933) Homepage

      Well, the silver lining is, if you can afford currently cheaper land / property just abit inland, and a couple of metres higher from sea level, you will find that it will become expensive sea view / beach view property in a few years time. /s

      By "a few years" you mean after the end of the century. Global warming is real and the associated sea level rise is indeed happening, but it won't be "meters" of sea level rise in your lifetime.

      IPCC projections with all the messy details of assumptions are here: https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chap... [www.ipcc.ch]

      More of a problem is flooding due to storm surges, where three different effects of climate warming reinforce each other: slightly higher sea level makes coastal areas more vulnerable to storm surge, warming makes storms more intense, exacerbating storm surges, and higher rainfall levels during storms contributes to flooding.

      • You might be surprised to know that large real estate companies have already been buying land with slightly higher ground just inland from Miami in anticipation of this...

      • Yeah the issue in most cases (not all, because sea rises aren't uniform) will be with, for example, hurricanes causing more damage with storm surge, as more land becomes floodable.

        So it's not so much that the sea will come inland soon, it's that the coast will become more dangerous and less habitable, and flood risks from storm surges will change from being a problem half a mile inland (typically) to several miles inland.

        Can we fix that? Not cheaply. If America's going to continue to have zoning, it might b

      • Even a rise by 29-59 cm as predicted by the end of the century will have serious effect on small islands and many coastal cities and areas. And about 10 % of the world's population lives near the sea.

        Also note that the level varies from place to place due to temperatures, gravity and the Earth’s spin.

    • Well, the silver lining is, if you can afford currently cheaper land / property just abit inland, and a couple of metres higher from sea level, you will find that it will become expensive sea view / beach view property in a few years time. /s

      So we are doing the original plot from 1978 Superman then..

  • Glad I live at the top of a hill (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Sunday March 16, 2025 @08:09AM (#65237759)
    May need to buy a boat.

    • May need to buy a boat.

      Where we are going, we won’t need roads.

    • If you expect to need a boat, you're not very high. I live in Colorado, and if I could see Denver (the Mile High City) from where I live, I'd have to look down. No way I'm going to worry about flooding unless it's of Biblical proportions, and then, only maybe as there's a mountain pass of over 7000' just south of me.

  • Too slow (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zawarski ( 1381571 )
    I want Mar-a-Lago underwater NOW.

  • And nothing will come because of it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter.tedata@net@eg> on Sunday March 16, 2025 @08:23AM (#65237781) Journal

    Tuvalu is sinking. [youtube.com] Meanwhile, Miami is building $100m+ skyscrapers. [waresidences.miami]

    Moral of the story: nobody will do anything to curb this crisis, because when one community goes underwater, the next one says, "Not my problem!"

    • Tuvalu is sinking. [youtube.com] Meanwhile, Miami is building $100m+ skyscrapers. [waresidences.miami] Moral of the story: nobody will do anything to curb this crisis, because when one community goes underwater, the next one says, "Not my problem!"

      Pretty much. What they are really saying is "we can make money in the near term, and we don't care much about whether this will still be a good place for skyscrapers a few decades down the road."

      (Also, they're thinking that when climate-change induced storms wash away the beaches that make beachfront condominiums valuable, no problem, they'll just get the feds to pay the bill to ship in more sand. [scientificamerican.com])

      • They don’t “ship in more sand” generally, they install an industrial dredging platform and pump hundreds of millions of gallons of sea bottom, sand, and debris across square miles of ocean bottom every day and pump it onto the beach, confused stunned fish, shells, and all. But it’s ok, you can’t really see the widespread destruction from shore.

    • Nobody actually does care about climate change. If they did, they'd elect politicians who would. What does this mean exactly?

      It means liberals understand why they lose elections. I have seen very, very little reflection outside of maybe what Stephen A. Smith has rightfully spoken about concerning the 2024 election.

      Secondly, globalists need to be marginalized. They're perhaps the worst carbon generators of anybody. Beyond that the less distance a good has to travel the less carbon enters the atmosphere. Inte

  • **THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS** It's all a sham that most Slashdot dorks bought into.

  • YEAH YEAH because Europe didn't spent money. But Donatd Trump took Elon Musk's chainaw and delete crlimate change.

    So all this didn't happen and won't ever happen and got sollved anyway (see "chainsaw").

    Why are you still standing around gawking?

    I thought I killed that media site. I'm pro free-speech like my DOGGIE BOYZ.

    - DonaQ Q Trump. Q is for queer.

  • SO its 1/4 an inch a year. That gives me around 4000 years to wait until I have beach front property.

  • When did this phrase become a thing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Sunday March 16, 2025 @10:07AM (#65237915)

    Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels

    I'm the opposite of a climate change denier, and I firmly believe that global warming is caused by humans. Yet I'd never heard that "human-amplified" qualifier before now. To me, it smacks of manipulation.

    So I did a couple of quick searches. On DDG there were 15 hits from MSN, and 7 from other sources. On Google, there were 11 hits from MSN, and 75 from other sources. And overall, the vast majority of results came from news sites.

    The small number of results tells me that "human-amplified climate change" is a recent phrase. And having news sites as its predominant source suggests to me that it's deliberate propaganda.

    It implies that global warming is only partly the result of human activities, and that it would be happening to some extent even if we weren't furiously pumping out greenhouse gases at an alarming rate. Regardless of whether or not that's true, such language promotes an 'oh well, it's gonna happen regardless so we may as well get used to it' attitude.

    It's the language of subservience, resignation, and defeat. As such, it serves the interests of the oligarchs who will build protected enclaves to shield themselves from the worst of the consequences while they let the rest of us suffer and die.

    Bend over folks - it's gonna be a long hard ride...

    • Re:When did this phrase become a thing? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ElimGarak000 ( 9327375 ) on Sunday March 16, 2025 @11:41AM (#65238095)

      When did this phrase become a thing?

      More than 20 years ago: "There is already in motion a process of sea level rise that will continue for many centuries as the extra heat trapped at Earth’s surface by the human-amplified greenhouse effect progressively enters the deep ocean water." -- From Climate Change And Human Health: Risks And Responses, by McMichael and Campbell-Lendrum, et al, published 2003 by the World Health Organization, ISBN-13: 978-9241562485. (Amazon link. [amazon.com]

      I found 10 scholarly references with a single Google search: https://scholar.google.com/sch... [google.com]

      It implies that global warming is only partly the result of human activities, and that it would be happening to some extent even if we weren't furiously pumping out greenhouse gases at an alarming rate. Regardless of whether or not that's true, such language promotes an 'oh well, it's gonna happen regardless so we may as well get used to it' attitude.

      I see it as an attempt to combat the scientifically-supportable argument that there are natural processes that contribute to global warming by emphasizing the fact that the human contribution is what's driving things well beyond the extent to which those natural processes could achieve; making the argument that the "some extent" to which the Earth would be warming on its own is far, far, far less than what we are seeing.

  • Based on the headline, 31 years ago sea levels were higher, but then they went down, and are now back up?

    Please explain, I don't remember ever reading anything about sea levels dropping in the past 30-some years.

    • Based on the headline, 31 years ago sea levels were higher, but then they went down, and are now back up?

      Not quite. The headline refers to a 31-year record high rate of sea-level rise, not a record high sea level.

      Please explain, I don't remember ever reading anything about sea levels dropping in the past 30-some years.

      They didn't. Data here: https://www.climate.gov/news-f... [climate.gov]

  • while the ultras rich still buy beachfront mansions

  • ...my wife told me so.

  • sea tides change (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's what they do. I live in coastal North County San Diego 2 block from the water. High tide today is 5.9 ft (above sea level). King tide is about 7.5 ft. in winter time (this is astronomical max. NOT due to storm which will give even higher tide.) low tide is -0.8 ft. The daily change is about 7 - 9 ft. Now think about what this story is saying - the daily variance may go from 7 - 9 feet to 7.02 - 9.02 feet.

    If you've ever seen the Pacific Ocean, you know how dumb a thing this would be to say.

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