Sea Level Rise From Antarctic Melt Could Be 30% Higher Than We Thought - ScienceAlert

"Every published projection of sea level rise due to melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet that has been based on climate modeling, whether the projection extends to the end of this century or longer into the future, is going to have to be revised upward because of their work," said Earth and planetary scientist Jerry Mitrovica of Harvard University.

As they performed their calculations, though, they noticed that there was a larger rise from a water expulsion mechanism than they expected, so they switched their focus to find out what was going on.

The team's calculations, however, added in the complex, three-dimensional viscoelastic structure of the mantle, and used it to model both past and future sea level changes due to melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.

During the last interglacial period, when the contribution to sea level rise from the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet had been calculated to be around 3 to 4 meters, the team found that the water expulsion mechanism added a meter over the course of 1,000 years.

"No matter what scenario we used for the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we always found that this extra one meter of global sea level rise took place," Pan said.