Melting Ice Raised Oceans 0.5 Inches in Seven Years

Basically, get to New Orleans and Venice while you still can.

The largest study of its kind to date has determined that melting ice led to a half-inch rise in sea levels around the world between 2003 and 2010. A team of researchers at the University of Colorado used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, on the rate of polar ice melting to arrive at the conclusion. They looked at glaciers and land ice in North America, South America, Asia, and Europe, in particular. All told, the team determined that the world lost some 4.3 trillion tons of ice across those seven years, giving the world's oceans a little 12-millimetre top-up. That half-inch is about what a standard drink of scotch looks like in a tumbler, for reference. Polar ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland made up about three-quarters of all ice lost, while the other quarter, about 148 billion tons, came from glaciers and ice caps elsewhere, including mountain ranges the world over and the high Arctic in Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia. As if there weren't enough problems in the world's lowest-lying country already...

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