Bobbing for the Big Apple

By 2100, visitors to Boston could be parking their boats, not their cars, in Harvard Yard. A new study led by Aixue Hu of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado suggests that many major cities in the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada "are directly in the path of the greatest rise" in sea levels if Greenland continues to melt due to global warming. The new projections call for an extra 4 to 12 inches (10.2 to 30.5 centimeters) on top of the rise of 8 inches (20.3 centimeters) previously estimated in the journal Nature Geoscience in March.

Previous studies had not taken into account how Greenland's melt might interact with an oceanic "conveyor belt" in the Atlantic Ocean, which transports water north from the tropics. “The more we know,” one researcher said, “the more we're finding things are more severe than we thought."

Hu’s research appears in the May 29 issue of the journal Geophysical Research.

Image courtesy of Architecture 2030