Tag: Sea Level Rise

A Slow-burn Existential Threat

/ activist360 / Leave a comment
There are islands in the Chesapeake Bay that have already succumbed to sea level rise, one of them is Holland Island.

Even in a best case scenario, the consensus is that we’ll get at least two feet of sea level rise by the year 2100.

One big question is: What will happen when flooding gets worse and worse and people decide there’s no hope for them anymore to live in their respective towns.

Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for the New York Times Magazine. His first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, was a New York Times bestseller. His latest is The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future.

Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier Reacts to Changing Ocean Temperatures

/ activist360 / Leave a comment
NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission uses ships and planes to measure how ocean temperatures affect Greenland’s vast icy expanses. Jakobshavn Glacier, known in Greenlandic as Sermeq Kujalle, on Greenland’s central western side, has been one of the island’s largest contributor’s to sea level rise, losing mass at an accelerating rate.

In a new study, the OMG team found that between 2016 and 2017, Jakobshavn Glacier grew slightly and the rate of mass loss slowed down. They traced the causes of this thickening to a temporary cooling of ocean temperatures in the region.

Narrated by OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis.
Music: Rising Tides by Rainman [PRS] Complete transcript available.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Kathryn Mersmann