Imagine your favourite sunny beach. Anywhere will do. You look out and see the ocean stretching to the horizon. To a glaciologist, that view is not just water; it’s melted ice.
Our new study shows that the best case sea-level rise scenarios may now be out of reach.
Around 20,000 years ago, during the most recent ice age, the Earth was about 5°C cooler than today. Vast ice sheets, comparable in scale to Greenland and Antarctica, covered Canada, northern Europe, and other regions. Those ice sheets formed as water evaporated from the oceans, fell as snow, and accumulated year after year on land.
