New Research Quantifies What's Causing Sea Level to Rise - by John Abraham

There have been a number of studies that have come out recently on ocean warming and sea-level rise. Collectively, they are helping scientists coalesce around an emerging understanding of climate change and its impact on the Earth.  Most recently, a study by scientists Sarah Purkey, Gregory Johnson, and Don Chambers was published.  This team was responsible for a 2010 paper that was groundbreaking in that it quantified very deep (abyssal) sea warming.  This latest paper is, in some respects, a continuation of that work.

The researchers recognized that changes to the sea levels are mainly caused by thermal expansion of ocean waters as they heat, changes to the saltiness of water, and by an increase in ocean waters as ice melts and flows into the sea.  The total annual sea level rise is about 3 mm per year – the question is, how much of that is from expansion and how much is from melting?

The researchers used a few tools to answer this question.  One tool was ocean bottom pressure measurements.  If you can measure changes to ocean pressure, you can deduce how much water is in the ocean.  Another tool is through an inventory approach. This inventory method quantifies how much glaciers retreat, polar ice melts, and changes to water storage on land.  The paper reports that both methods agree with each other. They conclude that increased water in the oceans is causing about 1.5–1.8 mm per year of sea level rise.  The actual value depends, in part, on which years are under consideration.

The authors don’t just consider the ocean as a whole.  They break the ocean regions into seven different sections.  The reason for this subdivision is that the change to ocean levels is not uniform.  In some reasons, waters are rising quickly, in other regions, the rise is much slower or zero.  One region for regional variability is that the Earth’s gravity is changing.

For instance, there is so much ice in Greenland and Antarctica that is melting and flowing into the ocean, the mass of these two regions is being reduced; therefore, the pull of gravity toward Greenland and Antarctica is changing.  As a result, we expect water levels near Greenland and Antarctica may actually fall as those ice sheets melt.

But, ocean levels elsewhere, particularly the USA coastlines, will rise more than average because of this same effect.  I have a paper in press with Ted Scambos on this very topic that should be published in a few weeks.  Another reason sea level rise isn’t uniform is that there are local changes to heat and salt which can increase or decrease water density in certain regions, causing local changes to sea level.  A third reason is that changes to wind patterns can slosh water around, causing it to build up in one area, fall in another.

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