December 2010 Home Subscribe Archive Contact Thematic Focus: Climate Change and Ecosystem Management Sea-level Rise in the Indian Ocean Differs by Region and Low-lying Pacific Reef Islands can Grow or Shrink in Size Depending on Conditions

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Greenland; Pacific; Indian; Reef Island; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.685.3892; http://na.unep.net/api/geas/articles/getArticlePDFWithArticleIDScript.php?article_id%3D56

Why is this issue important? Over the past few decades, sea levels worldwide have risen because of three primary phenomena related to climate change: the expansion of warming oceans, the input of fresh water from melting ice sheets and the loss of ice mass from Greenland and Antarctica (see the Near Real-Time Environmental Event Alert on page 7) (Climate Institute 2010). Rising seas threaten millions of people who live in densely populated coastal areas and low-lying islands, so it is critical for risk management purposes to estimate and prepare for the impacts of future sea-level rise and to be aware of regional differences. Detailed sea-level records provide testimony of sea-level rise over the past two decades, but shoreline monitoring and the detailed study of changes in island morphology are lacking. Given the international concern for the stability of small islands, it is important to complement sea-level records with quantified measures of reef-island changes at the same temporal scale to better inform the management of island landscapes in the face of climate change. What are the findings and implications? A new study (Han and others 2010) that combined ground and satellite observations of Indian