Land Ice and Sea Level Rise: A Thirty-Year Perspective
AIMED AT: Policy makers PURPOSE: To present perspective on the sea level rise caused by melting of glaciers GEOGRAPHICAL AREA: Coastal areas worldwide TECHNICAL AREA: Impacts of the sea level rise BASIC STRUCTURE: The present-day assessment of contributions to sea level rise from glaciers and ice sheets depends to a large degree on new technologies that allow efficient and precise detection of change in otherwise inaccessible polar regions. The creation of an overall research strategy, however, was set in early collaborative efforts nearly 30 years ago to assess and project the contributions of glaciers and ice sheets to sea level rise. Many of the research objectives recommended by those early collaborations were followed by highly successful research programs and led to significant accomplishments. Over the last decade, when mass loss rates from Greenland and Antarctica started to accelerate, some means of projecting glacier and ice sheet changes became increasingly necessary, and alternatives to deterministic numerical models were sought. The result was a variety of extrapolation schemes that offer partial constraints on future glacier and ice sheet losses, but also contain significant uncertainties and rely on assumptions that are not always clearly expressed. This review examines the history of assessments of glacier and ice sheet contributions to sea level rise, and consider how questions asked 30 years ago shaped the nature of the research agenda being carried out today.
Land Ice and Sea Level Rise: A Thirty-Year Perspective.pdf
