Rising Seas

It's interesting to compare the BBC report on past melting of the Antarctic's Ross Ice Shelf with this New Zealand report—closer to the research action—which preceded it by a few days. Though the BBC generally isn't shy about gloom and doom stories it seems to have fairly drastically edited the salient detail: "You can go from full glacial conditions to open ocean conditions very abruptly." With a resultant rise in sea levels of an estimated 5-17m. I've been pointing out for a while in this space (for example, here) that it makes sense to speculate about the possibility of a very rapid sea level rise in our near term future, and I'm glad to see that at least some scientists are doing just that, even if reports of it get a bit garbled along the way.