Global Warming Science Update: Addressing Drastic Sea Level Rises
Nicolas Loris /
Maybe Nobel Laureate and former Vice President Al Gore was right. In An Inconvenient Truth, he spoke of twenty-foot sea level rises “in the near future” while showing animations of Florida, Shanghai, Calcutta and Manhattan being swallowed by sea level increases. A new study released today in Nature that analyzes fossil coral reefs in Mexico “suggests that a sudden rise of 6.5 feet to 10 feet occurred within a span of 50 to 100 years about 121,000 years ago, at the end of the last warm interval between ice ages.” Their conclusion: Sustained rapid ice loss and sea-level rise in the near future are possible.
A rise of 6.5-10 feet over 50-100 years is pretty remarkable. But 121,000 years ago? How much of that sea level rise was human-induced?