Thanks to a collaboration between NASA and the UN, everyone can consult a detailed map showing how much sea levels are (and will) rise
Alarmism, skepticism, tendency to repeat that things are less worrying than the scientific community claims: unfortunately, the attitude that many people have towards the problems that afflict planet Earth is unquestionably this. Yet, today more than ever, we can take advantage of cutting-edge tools able to paint an extremely precise picture of the situation.
One of these has been available to us for a relatively short time: it is a interactive map born from a joint effort involving NASA and the UN, a precious tool that monitors and predicts the sea rise levelsreporting in a simple but at the same time detailed way all the (negative) changes affecting the world’s waters.
The creation of the map
As we have already mentioned, two institutions came together to create this precious instrument: on the one hand NASA and on the other the UN, which deployed all the highly trained researchers belonging to theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For those who don’t know, the IPCC is the United Nations intergovernmental panel that monitors climate change.
The IPCC, moreover, was born in 1988 with a very clear and precise objective: to provide political leaders around the world with periodic scientific evaluations on changes affecting the climate. For some years, in particular, the scientists who compose it have been paying attention to global warming and its implications. Clearly, there are several highly specialized teams operating within the IPCC.
Among these appears the Sea Level Change Team NASA, led by scientists Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer And Ben Hamlington. This team, specialized in the study, in-depth analysis and understanding of the correlation between climate change and sea level rise, has brought to light the map, which aims to take into account the impacts of marine and oceanic variations on communities coastal and beyond.
His goals
If the purpose of the IPCC is to transmit data relating to climate change to global leaders, the objective of the map is to spread information on the dangers of increasingly exponential rising water levels not to a few selected people but to the entire planet, especially in the coastal stretches. This is why the map can be consulted for free: you want raise public awareness and make the warning message that experts have been sending out for years stronger.
There are two ways in which the map seeks to achieve its objective: on the one hand, in fact, the tool offers a overview of the current situationbut on the other hand it is capable of provide future projections. This means that by consulting it it will be possible to have an idea of how high the sea level will be in that specific stretch of coast and which urban (or agricultural, or commercial) settlements could be overwhelmed by it.
To be able to create such a complex and accurate instrument, the researchers at Sea Level Change Team they had to analyze a huge set of climate data, provided by both the IPCC and NASA satellites. All this was cross-referenced with a series of computer simulations, which allow us to witness the effects of the different processes and phenomena that determine the rise in sea levels.
How does it work?
Although the basics are very elaborate, the map works in a very intuitive way: just select a decade (from 2020 to 2150) and click on the highlighted points, marked in blue. At this point the instrument will return a small window showing the total level of the quantity of sea water, with an invitation to delve deeper into the total projection.
The projection includes all the mathematical data which not only concerns the “simple” rise in the water level, but shows how long and at what speed the rise will occur. Plus, it highlights all the phenomena that are contributing and will continue to contribute, from melting ice to how ocean water circulation systems are changing.
