In recent years, the news about Earth’s climate—from raging wildfires and stronger hurricanes to devastating floods and searing heat waves—has provided little good news.
In recent years, the news about Earth’s climate—from raging wildfires and stronger hurricanes to devastating floods and searing heat waves—has provided little good news.
A new Dartmouth-led study, however, reports that one of the very worst projections of how high the world’s oceans might rise as polar ice sheets melt is highly unlikely—though it stresses that the accelerating loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctica is nonetheless dire.
The study challenges a new and alarming prediction in the latest high-profile report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change evaluating climate research and projecting the long- and near-term effects of the climate crisis. Released in full last year, the IPCC’s sixth assessment report introduced a possible scenario in which the collapse of the southern continent’s ice sheets would make Antarctica’s contribution to average global sea level twice as high by 2100 than other models project—and three times as high by 2300.
Read More: Dartmouth College
Icebergs near Bear Peninsula in West Antarctica are being studied as part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. (Photo Credit: Amy Chiuchiolo, National Science Foundation)
