Word: kopp
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...picture of the global average sea level, which is what really matters. Lots of factors can affect regional sea-level variability, including winds and local currents that push water consistently toward or away from a particular shore. "One of the biggest effects," says the study's lead author, Robert Kopp, who did his research during a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, "is gravity." The world's giant ice sheets, such as Greenland's, are so massive that they actually pull the oceans toward them, raising sea level in the surrounding region. "If you were in Scotland, and Greenland started melting...
Evidently not, though. To get a true picture of worldwide sea levels, Kopp and his colleagues gathered data from a wide range of individual studies to put together a global picture. "We reviewed data from 40 sites," he says, including evidence from ancient coral reefs, eroded beaches and telltale sediments laid down in the ebb and flow of 125,000-year-old tides. The bottom line: local effects and faulty assumptions may have led to an underestimate. "It's unclear," says Kopp, "why the Southern Hemisphere would have been warmer than we thought." It may have to do with changes...
...rise in sea level would be truly catastrophic if it happened by the end of this century. But there is no suggestion in the study that the rise is imminent. "We can only give a thousand-year average," says Kopp, meaning that it might well take a millennium for sea level to go up that much. The rise would be inevitable, though: even if we cut back emissions today, concentrations of greenhouse gases will continue to increase, albeit more slowly. As a result, if temperatures go up by as much...
...would necessarily be smooth. If ice sheets begin sliding into the sea faster than they have in the recent past - as they seem to be doing already - sea level could go up more quickly than average, reaching a catastrophic point relatively early, then staying there. "From our analysis," says Kopp, "we really can't know how long it would take." In short, the science is still uncertain - but less so than before, and moving in a direction that isn't reassuring...
...Crimson lineup included skippers junior captain Alan Palmer, junior Teddy Himler, and sophomore Brendan Kopp. Junior Grace Charles, sophomore Annie DeAngelo, and Konstadt took care of the crewing duties in the team race style of racing, which will be contested much more frequently in the spring...