Global sea level likely to rise up to 70 feet for future generations: study

According to Xinhua, the researchers, led by Kenneth Miller, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Rutgers University, reached their conclusion by studying rock and soil cores in Virginia, Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific and New Zealand. They looked at the late Pliocene epoch, 2. 7 million to 3.2 million years ago, the last time the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was at its current level, and atmospheric temperatures were two degrees C higher than they are now.

"The difference in water volume released is the equivalent of melting the entire Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, as well as some of the marine margin of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, " said Richard Lane, program director of the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the work. " Such a rise of the modern oceans would swamp the world's coasts and affect as much as 70 percent of the world's population."

"You don't need to sell your beach real estate yet, because melting of these large ice sheets will take from centuries to a few thousand years," Miller said in a statement. "The current trajectory for the 21st century global rise of sea level is two to three feet (0.8 to one meter) due to warming of the oceans, partial melting of mountain glaciers, and partial melting of Greenland and Antarctica."

Miller said, however, that this research highlights the sensitivity of the earth's great ice sheets to temperature change, suggesting that even a modest rise in temperature results in a large sea-level rise.

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