TUM-IAS Fellows´ Lunch by Prof. Jonathan Bamber: “Sea level rise: past, present and future”

TUM-IAS continued its series of Fellow Lunches with a presentation by Prof. Jonathan Bamber (University of Bristol), TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Senior Fellow.

Sea level rise (SLR) is one of the most pernicious and certain consequences of global heating. It is also one of the hardest processes to predict on climatic (centennial) time scales because of the cascade of Earth system components that influence it, particularly the complex and poorly understood behavior of the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica. One approach to understanding the future behavior of the ice sheets and the consequent SLR is to examine their past behavior. The paleo-climate record provides a picture of global mean changes, but in terms of human and societal impacts, it is not the global mean that matters, but what happens at the coast. This is even harder to unravel and predict, and the motivating goal for my fellowship.

Jonathan Bamber provided an overview of the paleo sea level record and what we can learn from it, the more recent near-global satellite record that gives us the most complete picture of the spatio-temporal variability in SLR over the last ~35 years, the causes and drivers of SLR, and its potential future impacts on society. He concluded with an outline and introduction to the approach we aim to take within the fellowship, combining state-of-the-art AI methods, new satellite observing instruments, and principles of physical oceanography to reconstruct and predict, at high spatial and temporal resolution, coastal sea level trends.