If the ice caps melt, low-lying coasts will disappear beneath the waves first, right? Not necessarily. The sea level 鈥渨ave鈥� takes time to travel around the globe, so Pacific islands could get a temporary reprieve, while Atlantic coasts bear the brunt.
Many climate models predict that melting in Greenland could cause a global sea level rise of more than a metre in the next century. This would engulf Pacific islands such as Kiribati and Tuvalu.
Yet Detlef Stammer of the University of Hamburg, Germany, says the majority of Greenland鈥檚 meltwater will stay in the Atlantic Ocean for at least 50 years, causing sea levels here to rise faster than expected. 鈥淭he Greenland ice cap is much less of a threat to tropical islands in the Pacific than it is for the coasts of North America and Europe,鈥� he says.
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Stammer built a computer model based on Greenland鈥檚 meltwater releases since 1948, which showed that currents would carry the meltwater to the tip of Africa before spilling east into the Indian Ocean, finally reaching the Pacific Ocean 30 years later.
After 50 years, sea level rise around Greenland and the east coast of North America would be 30 times as great as in the Pacific Ocean, whereas in Europe it would be six times as great (Journal of Geophysical Research, ).
Antarctic meltwater could be prevented from reaching much of the world for centuries due to strong currents in the Southern Ocean, says Stammer.
