A property of water is the reason oceans are

rising fast
GuiaMarieDelPradoandDaveMosher
Aug28,2015,3:55PM

As water heats, its volume increases. (Except for

one weird anomaly.) wa.edu.auEarth's oceans
rose an average of three inches since 1992, and
the warming waters show no signs of stopping,
NASA announced on August 26.

Steve Nerem, a climatologist who leads

NASA's Sea Level Change Team, said
"we're locked into 3 feet of sea level rise,
and probably more" if the present rate
continues.

But as the ocean continues to absorb

heat from global warming, that
estimate could be an
understatement. At risk are low-laying
cities like New Orleans, which hurricane Katrina devastated 10 years ago.

Melting glaciers and ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are responsible for at least two thirds
of sea level rise. The missing piece of the puzzle is a bizarre phenomenon called thermal expansion,
which is when heat causes water's volume to expand.

Water is weird. It’s one of the only liquids that expands as it freezes, at 0 degrees Celsius, yet
contracts as you warm it up to 4 C. (This is why water ice floats while most other types of ice sink.)

But if you warm up water beyond 4 C, the molecules violently push on one another, expanding the
total volume of liquid and making it take up more space.

Earth’s surface has warmed by about 0.8 degrees C on average since 1880, soon after the industrial
revolution kicked off.

This increase doesn’t sound like much,

explains NASA Earth Observatory, but it has
major consequences:

A one-degree global change is significant

because it takes a vast amount of heat to
warm all the oceans, atmosphere, and land
by that much. In the past, a one- to two-
degree drop was all it took to plunge the
Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree
drop was enough to bury a large part of
North America under a towering mass of ice
20,000 years ago.

And our world is undergoing some extensive warming, especially in the northern pole:
The world is warming, and it's increasing the volume of ocean water. NASA Earth ObservatoryThe Earth’s
oceans are especially at risk — they have responded to this increase by soaking up more and more heat as
global temperatures climb:

The ocean is one of Earth's biggest heat

sinks. NOAA

And since water expands when

heated, this excess heat absorption
has expanded the volume of Earth’s
oceans.

As of right now, this volume

increase by only a mere fraction of
a percent of the ocean's original
volume.

Yet applied to even part of the

planet's 335 million cubic
miles of water
(1.386 billion km³), e.g. surface waters, this increase adds up to significant sea level rise — on
top of increased water runoff from the world's melting ice reserves.

Global sea level rise since the Industrial

Revolution. Union of Concerned
Scientists

According to the Union of Concerned

Scientists, sea levels rose about 8
inches from 1880 to 2009, with
thermal expansion as the
predominant cause.

The new data from NASA show a

rise of 3 inches since 1992 — a
big jump compared to the past
100-or-so years.

Again, this doesn’t sound like much. But any increase gives storm surges that much of a leg up to
overwhelm coastal marshes, topple levees, and cause damage deeper and deeper inland.

This is a simplistic illustration of what that looks like for coastal cities, but it's a dangerous
scenario:
Union of Concerned Scientists

What’s more, the rate of sea level rise is only accelerating as oceans soak up more heat, expand,
and icebergs and glaciers continue to melt.

What's contributing to sea level rise. NASA Earth Observatory

Earth is maddeningly dynamic — especially the oceans. That’s partly why it takes so long to reveal
these trends in the first place; you have to take measurements over long periods of time to see the
trends.

To that end, researchers are still uncertain about the interplay of surface water and deep-ocean
warming. But it’s a given that if the planet keeps warming, as it’s on track to, and oceans continue
to soak up heat, vulnerable coastal cities like New Orleans are in a heap of trouble.