The change in global sea level rise since the beginning of the 20th century has been significantly larger than previous estimates according to new estimates in a new paper.
The paper, co-authored by Carling Hay, a Harvard post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), and Eric Morrow, a recent PhD graduate, says that previous estimates of global sea-level rise from 1900-1990 had been over-estimated by as much as 30 percent.
But it confirms previous estimates of sea-level change since 1990, and that suggests that the rate of sea-level change is increasing more quickly than previously believed.
"What this paper shows is that sea-level acceleration over the past century has been greater than had been estimated by others," Morrow said. "It's a larger problem than we initially thought. Another concern with this is that many efforts to project sea-level change into the future use estimates of sea level over the time period from 1900 to 1990," Morrow said. "If we've been over-estimating the sea-level change during that period, it means that these models are not calibrated appropriately, and that calls into question the accuracy of projections out to the end of the 21st century."