Word: rising
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Heat waves, droughts and mass extinctions are all potential threats from climate change. But the scariest risk has always been that of rapid sea-level rise caused by the collapse of the massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. There is enough water locked on Greenland alone to raise global sea levels by 23 ft. (7 m) if it melted, which would swamp coastal cities like London and Shanghai and all but wipe away small island states like the Maldives and Tuvalu. We can likely adapt, expensively, to higher temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, but it's difficult to imagine...
...While the geologic record shows the earth has experienced rapid sea-level rise in the past, during the sharp warm-ups that follow the end of ice ages, those big melts have occurred when the world had much less ice than it does now. Scientists are unsure of how quickly rising temperatures from global warming could destabilize and melt our existing sheets - the working assumption has been that such major melting and subsequent sea-level rise would take centuries, if not longer, even in a warmer world. (See TIME's special report on the environment...
...comparing them to similar reefs in the Bahamas, and determined that the seas might have risen by 6.5 to 10 ft. (2 to 3 m) over the course of 50 to 100 years - far faster than scientists had assumed. Only rapidly melting ice sheets could explain sea-level rise occurring that swiftly, which would indicate that the ice locked away in Greenland and Antarctica today might not be as safe as we had thought...
...undergraduate, Bennett attended Deep Springs College and finished his B.A. in English at Harvard University. He received his Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is earning his Ph.D. in English at Harvard this year. His dissertation is on the rise of creative writing programs after World War II. He is currently working on his second novel...
...institutions watch for economic vital signs. But maybe, for individuals, the sickness is what came before - the hallucination that debt would never need to be repaid, that values only rise, that bubbles never burst. When the markets collapsed, that fever broke. In our assumptions and attitudes and expectations, the recovery is already well under...