Global sea levels have risen 8cm since 1992, Nasa research shows

Scientists believe ocean currents and natural cycles are temporarily offsetting a sea level rise in the Pacific Ocean.
 Scientists believe ocean currents and natural cycles are temporarily offsetting a sea level rise in the Pacific Ocean. Photograph: Ray Collins/Barcroft Media
Scientists say warming waters and melting ice were to blame for levels rising faster than 50 years ago and ‘it’s very likely to get worse’
Sea levels worldwide have risen an average of nearly eight centimetres (three inches) since 1992 because of warming waters and melting ice, a panel of Nasascientists said on Wednesday.


In 2013 a United Nations panel predicted sea levels would rise from between 0.3 and 0.9 metres by the end of the century. The new research shows that sea level rise would probably be at the high end of that, said a University of Colorado geophysicist, Steve Nerem.
Sea levels were rising faster than they did 50 years ago and “it’s very likely to get worse”, Nerem said.
The changes are not uniform. Some areas showed sea levels rising more than 25cm and other regions, such as along the US west coast, actually falling, according to an analysis of 23 years of satellite data.
Scientists believe ocean currents and natural cycles are temporarily offsetting a sea level rise in the Pacific, and the US west coast could see a significant rise in sea levels in the next 20 years.


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 Nasa: sea levels rising as a result of human-caused climate change – link to video

“People need to understand that the planet is not only changing, it’s changed,” a Nasa scientist, Tom Wagner, said.
“If you’re going to put in major infrastructure like a water treatment plant or a power plant in a coastal zone ... we have data you can now use to estimate what the impacts are going to be in the next 100 years,” Wagner said.
Low-lying regions, such as Florida, are especially vulnerable, said Michael Freilich, the director of Nasa’s Earth science division.
“Even today, normal spring high tides cause street flooding in sections of Miami, something that didn’t happen regularly just a few decades ago,” Feilich said.
More than 150m people, mostly in Asia, live within a metre of the sea, he said.
The biggest uncertainty in forecasting sea level rise is determining how quickly the polar ice sheets will melt in response to warming temperatures.
“Significant changes are taking place today on ice sheets,” said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California in Irvine. “It would take centuries to reverse the trend of ice retreat.”
Scientists said about one-third of the rise in sea levels is due to warmer ocean water expanding, one-third to ice loss from the polar ice sheets and the remaining third to melting mountain glaciers.

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