Researchers say sea levels rising faster than predicted

Rises in sea levels during the coming decades could be much higher than previously believed, say experts. A new report by a consortium of scientists from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, and research centres in Germany and the US says that sea levels rose by an average of 1.6 m every hundred years when the Earth was last as warm as it is predicted to be by the end of the present century.

The report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience in December, suggests that current predictions of sea level rises may be too optimistic. In the last 20 years, the rising of sea levels has become one of the most ominous indications of climate change and one of the most frequent subjects for environmental debate.
In the last interglacial period (134 000 to 119 000 years ago), sea levels reached around 6 m above the present rate because of the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The consortium’s results provide the first hard evidence of the sea’s rise to these levels.

Such new studies are providing proof that sea levels are rising higher than scientists had previously believed, and it is becoming clear that governments have to act faster to mitigate the effects of climate change. In the last century, the Earth experienced a warming of 0.7