Researchers at New Orleans' Tulane University warn that the annual sea rise of half an inch detected over the past 12 years was further proof of the "urgency of the climate crisis for the Gulf region" and called for a major, sustainable effort to combat it.
The peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Communications says sea level rise has accelerated to unprecedented rates three times the global average during the 20th century.
"We systematically investigated the different causes, such as vertical land motion, ice-mass loss, and air pressure, but none of them could sufficiently explain the recent rate," said researcher Noah Hendricks, part of an eight-strong team led by Sonke Dangendorf, Assistant Professor of Tulane's Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering.
"Instead, we found that the acceleration is a widespread signal that extends from the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico up to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and into the North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Seas, which is indicative for changes in the ocean's density and circulation."
The team was able to isolate the different elements contributing to the speeding up of the rate at which sea levels were rising by dissecting field and satellite measurements dating back to 1900.
They discovered that changing wind patterns and ongoing warming are responsible for the expansion of this circulating ocean system, known as the Subtropical Gyre, since 2010. As gyres expand they occupy more space which causes the sea level to rise.
The study concludes the surge since 2010 is a temporary phenomenon caused by the effects of man-made climate change and weather-related variability compounding each other and sea level rise will most likely return to levels predicted by modeling.
But Tulane Geology Professor Torbjorn Tornqvist cautioned this was no reason to relax.
"These high rates of sea-level rise have put even more stress on these vulnerable coastlines, particularly in Louisiana and Texas where the land is also sinking rapidly."
Monday's study follows a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature raising new fears about the speed at which the ice sheets are likely to retreat in the future, with implications for rising sea levels.
Researchers from three British universities and the Geological Survey of Norway said they had confirmation that an ice sheet covering Eurasia during the last ice age retreated at a rate many times what they believed was possible, based on satellite measurements of Artic and Antarctic glaciers taken over the past 50 years.
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