While scientists have grown more confident about projections of sea level rise for the next few decades, many competing factors make it hard to see far into the coastal future.
Toward the end of the last Ice Age, as mile-thick glaciers weighed down the land surface and then melted, parts of New England and eastern Canada became inundated by water. Some lowlands flooded and formed inland basins like the Champlain Sea.
Ten thousand years later, with seas now rising because of global warming, scientists are combing through an array of data and building increasingly detailed models to understand the processes that drive regional and local changes in sea level. The goal is to project when, where, and how much seas are likely to rise in the coming decades and centuries. It's an incredibly complicated set of interdependent calculations.
“People tend to think that sea level is like a bathtub with the water level simply rising and falling depending on how much water is coming out of the faucet,” said paleoclimatologist Anders Carlson of the Oregon Glaciers Institute. “In reality, it’s more like a spinning bathtub that’s changing shape, moving up and down, and has water pouring into and out of different drains and over the sides. Where the water will ultimately slosh over the edge of the tub is influenced by many things, making it difficult to say where the overtopping will occur.”
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Image via NASA Earth Observatory
