Sea levels rise 10 cm since 1993 as ice caps melt

Sea levels are now 10 cm higher than in 1993, and the rise is accelerating, according to new high-resolution satellite measurements by NASA.

Sea and land temperatures are at all-time highs and the world just recorded its hottest day since records began on July 21, as the Climate Crisis accelerates faster than scientists predicted.

“Sea level rise is complicated. Land rises and falls. Ocean currents, wind, rivers, etc, affect levels. There is an uncertainty band. But thanks to satellites, which average out levels across the whole earth, that uncertainty is now low and the trend clear,” climate activist Simon Oldridge said in a post on social media.

That is a small rise, but there are gigatonnes of ice at the ice caps that are melting slowly, but steadily. Most of the climate models predict that missing the 1.5C limit on temperature rises will lead to a significant rise in the sea levels by as much as seven metres.

In that event island nations like the Maladies will be submerged. A recent study found that most of the cities on West Africa’s coast will also end up underwater.

And the melting of the icepack at the poles is accelerating. Another recent study found that the deviation of the icepack’s extent from its 1991-2020 mean, as the extent of the ice coverage ebbs and flows due to the changing season, is now five standard deviations away from the average.

A standard deviation is a measure of the change from the average value in a normal, or Gaussian, distribution. Usually, about half of the deviations from the norm are contained in one standard deviation from the mean, and some 95% of the deviations are contained within two standard deviations. To be five standard deviations from the mean is an extremely unlikely statistical event right at the very edge of the normal distribution.