



Seas may be rising faster than predicted: scientists

Greenland's rate of ice melt has increased rapidly.

Greenland's rate of ice melt has increased rapidly. Photo: Getty Images

The melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is accelerating and may trigger faster sea level rise than predicted, according to leaked details of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Greenland's ice added six times more to sea levels in the decade through 2011 than in the prior 10 years, according to details of a draft 2200-page study by the UN agency, obtained by Bloomberg.

The Antarctic experienced a five-fold increase, prompting the UN to raise its forecast for how much the two ice sheets would add to Earth's oceans by 2100.

The leak comes just weeks before the IPCC gathers on September 23 in Stockholm, with the Fifth Assessment Report scheduled to be released four days later. National delegates are expected to wade through 1800 comments to achieve consensus on the important Summary for Policymakers during the event.

The report's assessment of ice melt from Greenland and Antarctica will be closely watched. The previous IPCC report, released in 2007, drew criticism from some scientists for underplaying the potential contribution from the two regions.

"Greenland is losing mass and the rate of loss from Greenland has increased," said Ian Allison, a Hobart-based honorary research professor and lead author of the IPCC report's chapter on the cryosphere. "Antarctica is also losing mass but the signal is not so strong whether it's accelerating."

Sea levels are now forecast to rise by as much as 80 centimetres by the end of the century and are expected to continue to rise after that.

According to the leaked report, Greenland's contribution to rising sea levels "very likely" rose to an average of 0.59 millimetres a year from 2002 to 2011, from 0.09 millimetres a year in the prior decade. Global sea levels have been rising at the rate of more than 3 millimetres a year. Together, Greenland and Antarctica contain enough ice to raise global sea levels by almost 66 metres.

The IPCC leaks come as Australia is likely to register a poor snow season. Temperatures often favoured rain rather than snow, with the early arrival of warm spring weather likely to continue a trend towards shorter snow seasons.

"The world is defrosting," Professor Neville Nicholls, a climate expert at Monash University, said in a recent interview. "We're losing snowfields, we're losing glaciers and we're starting to get melting of the big ice blocks on Greenland, even on Antarctica over the last decade or so."

"It's just more and more evidence that the whole world is warming."


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