Climate Explained: When Antarctica melts, will gravity changes lift up land and lower sea levels?
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz . Q: Ive heard the gravity changes when Antarctica melts will lower the seas around New Zealand. Will that save us from sea level rise? The gravitational changes when Antarctica melts do indeed affect sea levels all over the world but not enough to save New Zealand from rising seas . READ MORE: * Climate explained: Will the tropics eventually become uninhabitable? * Climate Explained: Sunspots do affect our weather, a bit, but not as much as other things * Climate Explained: Are we doomed if we dont manage to curb emissions by 2030? The ice ages and their effects on sea level, geology, flora and fauna were topics of intense scientific and public interest all through the 19th century. Heres how James Croll explained the gravity effect of melting ice in his 1875 book Climate and Time in their Geologic Relations . Let us now consider the effect that this condition of things would have upon the level of the sea. It would evidently tend to produce an elevation of the sea level on the northern hemisphere in two ways. First, the addition to the sea occasioned by the melting of the ice from off the Antarctic land would tend to raise the general level of the sea. Secondly, the removal of the ice would also tend to shift the Earths centre of gravity to the north of its present position and as the sea must shift along with the centre, a rise of the sea on the northern hemisphere would necessarily take place. His back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested the effect on sea level from ice melting in Antarctica would be about a third bigger than average in the northern hemisphere and a third smaller in the south. A more detailed mathematical study by Robert Woodward in 1888 has falling sea level as far as 2000km from Antarctica, but still rising by a third more than average in the north. Woodwards method is the basis of determining what is now called the sea-level fingerprint of melting ice. Two other factors also come into play. Combining these effects gives the sea-level fingerprints of 1m of sea-level rise from either the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) or Greenland (GIS). Woodwards method from 1888 holds up pretty well some locations in the northern hemisphere can get a third more than the average sea level rise. New Zealand gets a little bit below the average effect from Antarctica, and a little more than average from Greenland. Overall, New Zealand can expect slightly higher than average sea-level rise. Combining the sea-level fingerprints of all known sources of melting ice, together with other known changes of local land level such as subsidence and uplift, gives a good fit to the observed pattern of sea-level rise around the world. For example, sea level has been falling near West Antarctica due to the gravity effect. The global average rise in sea level is 110mm for 1900-1993 and 100mm for 1993-2020. The recent acceleration is mostly due to increased thermal expansion of the top 2km of the oceans (warm water is less dense and expands) and increased melting of Greenland. But the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite has revealed the melting of Antarctica has accelerated by a factor of five in recent decades. Future changes in Antarctica represent a major source of uncertainty when trying to forecast sea levels . Much of West Antarctica lies below sea level and is potentially subject to an instability in which warming ocean water melts the ice front from below. This would cause the ice sheet to peel off the ocean floor, accelerating the flow of the glacier towards the sea. In fact, this has been directly observed, both in the location of glacial grounding lines, some of which have retreated by tens of kilometres in recent decades, and most recently by the Icefin submersible robot which visited the grounding line of the Thwaites Glacier, 2000km east of Scott Base, and found the water temperature to be 2 degrees Celsius above the local freezing point. The big question is whether this instability has been irreversibly set into motion. Some glaciologists say it has , but the balance of opinion, summarised by the IPCCs report on the cryosphere, is that: Observed grounding line retreat ... is not definitive proof that Marine Ice Sheet Instability is under way. Whether unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat has begun or is imminent remains a critical uncertainty. The IPCC special report on 1.5C concluded that these instabilities could be triggered at around 1.5C to 2C of global warming. Predictions for New Zealand range from a further 0.46m of sea-level rise by 2100 (under a low-emission scenario, with warming kept under 2C) to 1.05m (under a high-emission scenario). A continued rise in sea levels over future centuries may be inevitable there are 66m of sea-level rise locked up in ice at present but the rate will depend on how fast we can reduce emissions. A five-year, $7 million research project, NZ SeaRise , is now under way, seeking to improve predictions of sea-level rise out to 2100 and beyond and their implications for local planning. Robert McLachlan is a Professor in Applied Mathematics at Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .