The oceans are coming, part 3: Remaining afloat

By Keith Farnish and Dmitry Orlov …In Part I of this series, just a couple of months ago, we cheerfully wrote: “The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (that’s the big blob that surrounds the South Pole just off-centre) seems to be quite stable, and should remain that way for the next few centuries.” That would have […]

Sunshine Coast beach receding rapidly

By BILL HOFFMANJanuary 18, 2010 THE central Sunshine Coast’s rapidly receding coastline means it is almost inevitable a hard structure will need to be built to halt further erosion. That is the grim assessment of Sunshine Coast Council manager of coast and canal engineering Denis Shaw as he has watched the high tide line close […]

Graph of the Day: Antarctic Ice Mass Loss, 2002-2009

The continent of Antarctica has been losing more than 100 cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice per year since 2002. Measurements from the Grace satellites confirm that Antarctica is losing mass 11. Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, uses Grace data to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet from space. Her […]

Graph of the Day: Trend in Ocean Surface Temperature, 1959-2008

Long-term 50-year change in sea surface temperature (SST) during 1959-2008 calculated by fitting a linear trend to 50 years of monthly SST data at each grid point. The SST fields are from the Hadley Centre data set as described by Rayner et al. (2006). The Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009: Updating the world on the Latest Climate […]

Louisiana village will not be moved despite rising sea and hurricanes

By Cain Burdeau4:00 AM Wednesday Jan 6, 2010 …Bourg is a tidy Cajun bayou town a few kilometres north of Dardar’s hurricane-smashed Indian village, in the marsh to which holdout families are being urged to move by a tribal chief, scientists and public officials. Why? Because life on this spit of soggy land 10km from […]

Sea level rise may exceed worst expectations

Seas were nearly 10 metres higher than now in previous interglacial period. By Richard A. Lovett With climate talks stalling in Copenhagen, a study suggests that one problem, sea level rise, may be even more urgent than previously thought. Robert Kopp, a palaeoclimatologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and his colleagues examined sea level […]

Time-lapse video of Arctic coastline eroding, ‘orders of magnitude’ faster than historical rates

The northern coastline of Alaska midway between Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay is eroding by up to one-third the length of a football field annually because of a “triple whammy” of declining sea ice, warming seawater and increased wave activity, according to new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The conditions have […]

Portions of Arctic coastline eroding, no end in sight

  (University of Colorado at Boulder) The northern coastline of Alaska midway between Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay is eroding by up to one-third the length of a football field annually because of a “triple whammy” of declining sea ice, warming seawater and increased wave activity, according to new study led by the University of […]

Rising waters threaten Louisiana

The southern coast of Louisiana in the United States is among the fastest disappearing areas in the world. Rising waters have led to the state losing a land mass equivalent to 30 football fields every day. And as the communities disappear, more and more people are leaving the region. Nick Clark reports from Louisiana. Rising […]

Climate change eroding Alaska coast at accelerating rate

By Tim BradnerAlaska Journal of Commerce Coastal erosion isn’t the only climate-related problem confronting rural communities. Health officials now are concerned about food and water safety in northern villages as warming temperatures thaw ice cellars and melting permafrost increases the organic content in rivers, creating problems in village water treatment plants. As for erosion, it […]

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