Sea-level rise: West Antarctic ice shelf melt ‘unavoidable’

BBC

Increased melting of West Antarctica’s ice shelves is “unavoidable” in the coming decades, a new study has warned.

These floating tongues of ice extend from the main ice sheet into the ocean, and play a key role in holding back the glaciers behind.

But as ice shelves melt, it can mean that the ice behind speeds up, releasing more into the oceans.

The study’s findings suggest that future sea-level rise may be greater than previously assumed.

“Our findings seem to increase the likelihood that [current] estimates [of sea-level rise] will be exceeded,” Dr Kaitlin Naughten of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the report’s lead author, told the BBC.

In 2021, the UN’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released its latest estimates of future sea-level rise. 

It projected global average sea-level rise of between 0.28m and 1.01m by 2100 – one key reason being the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. 

Sea-level rises of around a metre may not sound much, but even these increases would put hundreds of millions of people worldwide at risk of coastal flooding…