Why did the water rise years ago?

Answer 1

Good question...

The water rise of the earth is believed to be because of the melt of Antarctica.

Antarctica is melting due to global warming and the increasing temperature throughout the years. The heat causes Antarctica to melt and cause an increase of water/ocean level.

Here are some good information...

THE most comprehensive study to date of Antarctica's ice confirms growing concern that the ice cap is melting faster than predicted.

The implications are that the global sea level will rise faster than expected, while a huge influx of freshwater into the salty oceans could alter ocean currents.

Antarctica holds 90 per cent of Earth's ice.

According to the new findings, snowfall is topping up ice in the continent's interior and East Antarctic has held its own. But West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula lost nearly 200 billion tonnes of ice in 2006 alone.

That is 75 per cent more than losses in 1996 and the equivalent of a global sea level rise of more than half a millimetre, claim international scientists led by NASA geoscientist Eric Rignot, also with the University of California, Irvine (UCI).

"Losses are concentrated along narrow channels occupied by outlet glaciers and are caused by ongoing and past glacier acceleration," the team wrote in the online edition of Nature Geoscience.

They based their conclusions on satellite data obtained in 1996, 2000 and 2006.

According to Dr Rignot, the results showed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had underestimated the impact of polar melting in its predictions of possible sea level rises next century.

"Each time I look at some new data, I am astonished," he said.

Until now, it has been unclear whether snowfall in the interior kept pace with coastal melting, in terms of the overall mass of Antarctic ice.

But for Hobart glaciologist Ian Allison - with the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre - the new findings settle the matter.

"This work suggests that the ice flow is accelerating," Dr Allison said.

"It's worrying because ... the changes are happening due to processes we don't understand."

Dr Allison said the findings confirmed previous work, much by Dr Rignot and another UCI scientist Isabella Velicogna.

It also fits with observations that the break-up in 1995 and 2002 of two sections of the Larsen ice shelf, in the West Antarctic ice sheet, was sped up by the melting of glaciers that were behind it.

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