{"id":632,"date":"2015-05-09T22:58:33","date_gmt":"2015-05-09T22:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ldeo.columbia.edu\/2015report\/?page_id=632"},"modified":"2016-02-17T16:40:53","modified_gmt":"2016-02-17T16:40:53","slug":"sea-level-rise","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blog.ldeo.columbia.edu\/2015report\/research\/sea-level-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"Ice Sheets & Sea Level Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"
Antarctica holds about 27 million cubic kilometers of ice that is constantly flowing, pushed by its own weight. If just part of that ice \u2013 the West Antarctic Ice Sheet \u2013 were to melt into the ocean, it would raise global sea level by 6 meters. While that loss isn\u2019t imminent, it\u2019s more than a theoretical problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAs our planet warms, the polar regions are warming faster than anywhere else on our planet and the ice sheets are changing. \u00a0They’re melting and they’re sliding faster toward the ocean. Global sea level is going up, and we expect that to go up faster as more of the ice melts,\u201d said Robin Bell, a glaciologist at Columbia University\u2019s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who is leading the Changing Ice, Changing Coastlines Initiative with paleoclimateologist Maureen Raymo.<\/p>\n To understand how a massive ice sheet can become destabilized, we need to understand the structure of the land that holds the ice on Antarctica today.<\/p>\n Bell and her colleagues at Lamont engineered a way to do that in some of the most remote regions on the planet. They took radar and other technology often used on ships to study the sea floor and attached them to a C-130 cargo plane in a capsule called the IcePod<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2015, a team of scientists and the Air National Guard began a two-year series of flights with the IcePod over Antarctica\u2019s Ross Ice Shelf to map the terrain hidden beneath.<\/p>\n