Extreme Sea Levels Will Become 100x More Frequent Along Coastlines Across the World

Global warming will cause extreme sea levels to occur almost every year by the end of the century, impacting major coastlines worldwide, according to new research from an international team of scientists.

Published recently in Nature Climate Change, the research predicts that because of rising temperatures, extreme sea levels along coastlines across the world will become 100 times more frequent by the end of the century in about half of the 7,283 locations studied.

Co-author of the study, University of Melbourne’s Dr. Ebru Kirezci, an ocean engineering researcher said areas where frequency of extreme sea levels are expected to increase faster include the Southern Hemisphere and subtropic areas, the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Peninsula, the southern half of North America’s Pacific Coast, and areas including Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Philippines and Indonesia.

“What we can also infer from this study, is that most of the eastern, southern, and southwestern coastlines of Australia will be impacted with almost an annual frequency of these extreme sea levels by 2100,” Dr. Kirezci said.

“This increased frequency of extreme sea levels will occur even with a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees CelsiusThe Celsius scale, also known as the centigrade scale, is a temperature scale named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius. In the Celsius scale, 0 °C is the freezing point of water and 100 °C is the boiling point of water at 1 atm pressure.”>Celsius. And the changes are likely to come sooner than the end of the century, with many locations experiencing a 100-fold increase in extreme events even by 2070.”

Lead author of the study, climate scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Dr Claudia Tebaldi said it was no surprise that sea level rise will be dramatic even at 1.5 degrees and will have substantial effects on extreme sea level frequencies and magnitude.

“This study gives a more complete picture around the globe. We were able to look at a wider range of warming levels in very fine spatial detail,” Dr. Tebaldi said.

The researchers called for more detailed studies to understand how the changes will impact communities within different countries. They added that the physical changes that the study describes will have varying impacts at local scales, depending on several factors, including how vulnerable the site is to rising waters and how prepared a community is for change.

“Public policymakers should take note of these studies and work towards improving coastal protection and mitigation measures. Building dykes and sea walls, retreating from shorelines, and deploying early warning systems are some of the steps which can be taken to adapt to this change,” Dr. Kirezci said.

For more on this research, read Extreme Sea Levels to Become Far More Common Worldwide as Earth Warms.

Reference: “Extreme sea levels at different global warming levels” by Claudia Tebaldi, Roshanka Ranasinghe, Michalis Vousdoukas, D. J. Rasmussen, Ben Vega-Westhoff, Ebru Kirezci, Robert E. Kopp, Ryan Sriver and Lorenzo Mentaschi, 30 August 2021, Nature Climate Change.
DOI: 10.1038/s41558-021-01127-1

The research was led by the US based Joint Global Change Research Institute in collaboration with researchers from the University of Melbourne, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands, the European Joint Research Centre in Italy, Princeton UniversityFounded in 1746, Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey and the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. It provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.”>Princeton University, the University of Illinois, Rutgers University and the University of Bologna.

The study was funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency and their Department of Energy’s Office of Science.