High tech may pinpoint Antarctica sea rise risks

Climate change is turning Antarctica’s ice into one of the biggest risks for coming centuries. Even a tiny melt could drive up sea levels, affecting cities from New York to Beijing, or nations from Bangladesh to the Cook Islands — named after the mariner — in the Pacific.

Scientists are now trying to design ever more high tech experiments — with satellite radars, lasers, robot submarines, or even deep drilling through perhaps 3 kilometers of ice — to plug huge gaps in understanding the risks.

“If you’re going to have even a few metres it will change the geography of the planet,” Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said of the more extreme scenarios of fast ocean rise.

“Greenland and Antarctica are two huge bodies of ice sitting on land that could really have very serious implications for the levels of the seas,” Pachauri told Reuters.

Eventually discovered in 1820, Antarctica locks up enough water to raise sea levels by 57 metres (187 ft). Greenland stores the equivalent of 7 metres.

Reuters