What would the ramification to the sounds be if the Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed from global warming?
Until recently the most often quoted range of global sea level rise (SLR) estimates from the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) was 5 to 6 meters. In May 2009, however, a research article by Bamber et al. in the Journal Science reassessed this scenario. The good news is that the mean SLR was cut by about 50% to 3.2 meters. The not-so-good news is that the eastern coast of the United States had among the highest SLR estimates at 4 meters (25% greater than the global mean). It is not clear how long a complete collapse would take once it began. Note that such an increase dwarfs the 0.2 to 0.6 meter SLR forecast for the 21st Century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 when melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica aren’t considered, as well as dwarfing the 0.3 meter SLR rise in the 20th Century.
