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Global change

Interglacial and future sea level

Nature volume 462, pages 856–857 (2009)Cite this article

A merger of data and modelling using a probabilistic approach indicates that sea level was much higher during the last interglacial than it is now, providing telling clues about future ice-sheet responses to warming.

Predicting sea-level rise in a warming world is one of science's great challenges. According to sea-rise projections for the twenty-first century, the 145 million people living within a metre of the present sea level risk losing their land and their homes. Many more would be affected by the resulting socio-economic disruption1. Our poor understanding of ice-sheet dynamics means that projecting sea-level rise beyond the twenty-first century is much less certain2. On page 863 of this issue, however, Kopp et al.3 derive a new assessment of sea level during the last interglacial, around 125,000 years ago, that provides insight into this question. If their results are correct, the sea-level rise over the coming century will be followed by many more metres of rise over the ensuing centuries.

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Figure 1: Similarity of latitudinal warming (ΔT) during the last interglacial and a projection for the late twenty-first century.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Peter U. Clark is in the Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. clarkp@onid.orst.edu,

    Peter U. Clark

  2. Peter Huybers is in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. phuybers@fas.harvard.edu,

    Peter Huybers

Authors
  1. Peter U. Clark
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  2. Peter Huybers
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Clark, P., Huybers, P. Interglacial and future sea level. Nature 462, 856–857 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462856a

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