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Very cool map of rising sea levels

By illconsidered on August 21, 2008.

From NASA JPL's Global Climate Change website, here is a very cool map of sea level rise around the world.

Despite what one might think at first, sea level, and sea level rise, is not uniform around the world.

Local sea level is a surprisingly complicated function of wind, currents and temperature and globally sea levels can vary by up to 2 metres. The largest factor is the temperature in the local water column, thermal expansion from warming is the greatest contrubutor to sea level changes. Measuring sea level rise can be even more difficult due to the masking or amplifying effects of land mass movements. Many parts of the globe are still rising after the melt-off of massive ice sheets (isostatic rebound), other areas, like New Orleans, are sinking.

This map was created with sea surface height data from the Topex/Poseidon and Jason-1 satellites which is unaffected by land movements and it shows today's sea level anomalies from 1993 levels.

Have a look at JPL's article for more interesting tidbits.

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Science

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