Greenland, Antarctica ice sheets melting faster than expected

The new estimate of ice sheet melting and subsequent rise in sea level comes from an international team led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It outstrips more modest figures offered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, the last time that international body published a comprehensive assessment of the ice sheets.

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“It’s going to be a concern for people in coastal areas,” said Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, a co-author of the report online at Geophysical Research Letters. “It looks like [the IPCC estimate] will easily be an underestimate of the sea level rise.”

While six inches of additional sea height might sound small, the increase will distribute unevenly across the globe, Velicogna said, and have a disproportionate impact on low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.

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