China News Service, Beijing, February 15th (Reporter Sun Zifa) Affected by global warming, issues such as the trend and magnitude of global sea level rise have attracted the attention of academic circles and the public over the years.
In a new climate change paper published in Nature Communications, an academic journal under Springer Nature, the researchers used new climate modeling simulations to show that under future high-emission scenarios, by 2150, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are expected to Raise the global sea level by about 1.4 meters.
If global temperatures rise by 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels, irreversible Antarctic sea ice loss and sharply accelerated sea level rise are projected.
The latest results of this study may provide a more accurate estimate of global sea level rise than previous climate models, the paper said.
According to reports, the global average sea level has risen by about 20 centimeters in the past century, and as humans' influence on global warming increases, this trend may accelerate.
With a large proportion of the global population living near coastlines, accurate predictions of global and regional future sea level trends are therefore critical.
Currently, the response of the Antarctic ice sheet to global warming presents the greatest uncertainty in estimating future sea levels.
Recent studies estimate that sea levels could rise by 1.4 meters by 2150 under high emissions scenarios, and these assessments take into account the effects of thermal expansion of seawater, ice sheets and glaciers.
However, most existing global sea level projections ignore active ice sheet-climate interactions in their models.
To this end, the co-corresponding authors of the paper, Jun-Young Park of Pusan University in South Korea, Fabian Schloesser of the University of Hawaii in the United States, and their colleagues proposed a new climate model that considered the complex interactions of ice sheets, icebergs, oceans and the atmosphere.
This model allowed them to study the likely future evolution of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and better estimate their impact on sea level rise.
Under the high future emissions scenario, these two ice sheets alone are projected to each raise global sea level by 60-70 cm over the next 130 years.
Additionally, the authors found that limiting global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels may not be sufficient to slow global sea level rise and prevent irreversible loss of the vast West Antarctic ice sheet.
The authors conclude that accelerated sea level rise can only be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.8°C relative to pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
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