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Climate science

The long future of Antarctic melting

Nature volume 526, pages 327–328 (2015)Cite this article

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Simulations show that melting of the Antarctic ice sheet in response to climate change could raise the global sea level by up to 3 metres by the year 2300 and continue for thousands of years thereafter. See Letter p.421

Most projections of Antarctic ice melting in response to climate change extend a maximum of a few centuries into the future, a timescale that has clear relevance to immediate human affairs. But to capture the total Antarctic contribution to sea-level rise caused by climate change, it is necessary to consider the possibility that ice-sheet mass loss will continue for thousands of years. On page 421 of this issue, Golledge and colleagues1 present multi-millennial ice-sheet simulations in which Antarctica continues to contribute significantly to global mean sea-level rise for more than 1,000 years, long after ocean and air temperatures have stopped increasing. The authors' simulations also show that ice-shelf melting driven by ocean warming over the next 100–300 years is a critical factor in determining the total future rise in global sea level.

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Figure 1: Ice-shelf collapse.

Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Centre

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alexander Robel is in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, and in the Department of Geophysical Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA, University of Chicago.,

    Alexander Robel

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  1. Alexander Robel
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Correspondence to Alexander Robel.

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Robel, A. The long future of Antarctic melting. Nature 526, 327–328 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/526327a

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