Towards better sea-level forecasting

By: Colin Meyer, CSO Ambassador

The world faces a significant risk of sea-level rise of one meter or more this century, driven primarily by the potential collapse of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. This could lead to the displacement of over half a billion people, trillions in infrastructure costs, and the loss of low-lying countries and areas worldwide.

Arête Glacier Initiative, a new non-profit research organization that I (Colin Meyer, Associate Professor at Dartmouth College) co-founded with Brent Minchew, Professor of Geophysics at Caltech, is funding and coordinating a global effort to improve our ability to forecast sea-level rise and evaluate responsible interventions to counter it by stabilizing ocean-bound glaciers.

While reducing emissions and other efforts to decarbonize and reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are essential to countering many aspects of climate change, reducing, or even eliminating emissions will not address glacier destabilization and the threat of catastrophic sea-level rise due to internal feedback loops that are already in motion. Arête’s work complements decarbonization and adaptation.

Arête is a decadal-scale project. Ten years from now, if Arête is successful, we’ll have dramatically advanced sea-level forecasting and demonstrated one or more strategies for ice-sheet stabilization to be safe, effective, and scalable. We will ensure that sea-level forecasts are in the hands of planners, policymakers, and affected peoples around the world. We will have detailed plans for how to implement environmentally sound, responsible intervention strategies at scale and have laid the groundwork to ensure that logistical support in Antarctica is ready to meet the needs of these interventions. 

You can learn more about Arête here.