Sea level rise

2000/05/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Geologia

If polar ice melts, sea level will rise and many coastal villages will dive. There is nothing new about saying. It is a topic that takes time between us and is older than expected.

125,000 years ago the sea level had grown up to 5 meters above the current one. But the origin of the water that raised the sea level was not very clear. The main suspect was the ice sheet of western Antarctica, which was at lower sea level and had a strong tendency to melt. But American researchers have placed the culprit in the north. Researchers at the University of California have studied the isotopes of the oxygen atom and found that the temperature of Greenland was then 8°C warmer than the current one.

According to them, the thaw of the North Pole was responsible for the rise of sea level and not the thaw of the South Pole, as it was believed so far.