NASA Chief: 'Still Time' to Heed Ominous Sea Level Rise Data

The administrator of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) says attention must be paid to new data forecasting an approximately one meter rise in sea levels by the turn of the century.

“It sounds definitive and ominous because that’s the way nature works,” Charles Bolden Jr. told VOA Friday in Bangkok.

His comment came after a team of NASA scientists in the U.S. Wednesday briefed reporters on their research documenting an average nearly eight centimeter global sea level rise since 1992, the result of warming waters and melting ice.

“Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it’s pretty certain we are locked into at least three feet (0.91 meters) of sea level rise, and probably more,” by 2100, said Steve Nerem of NASA’s Sea Level Change Team and a professor of engineering aerospace sciences at the University of Colorado.

The data is especially significant for Asia where more than 150 million people live within one meter of the current sea level.

“We still have time to make a difference if we’ll pay attention to what the data says,” Bolden, a retired U.S. Marine Corps major general and former astronaut, said during the VOA interview.

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