CNN current event published on: August 27, 2015
The definition of sea level is the general point where the ocean meets the land. NASA warns us that the sea levels of our oceans may be rising more rapidly then we have thought. Because so many of our cities are build not feet away from the oceans, or from large bodies of water, this fact could cause drastic changes in our country and around the world. Normally a couple of inches in the change of a sea level would take hundreds maybe even thousands of years to occur. NASA claims that over the past century, as the global temperature has risen, we have seen sea levels rise faster then at any point in the past two thousand years. The two main causes of sea levels rising are 1) thermal expansion and 2) land based ice melting. Thermal expansion is the process that causes a volume to change or increase do to the rising of temperature. So as our oceans heat up, they also expand. Land based ice melting into our oceans has a different affect than ocean based ice melting. An example of this that is used in my reference video is ice melting in a glass of water. When the ice melts it doesn't cause the water to rise. However when land ice melts into our oceans, the level of water will rise because more water is being added into the body. Scientists warn that if we continue to contribute to the warming of the planet, if we approach 2 degrees of warming, we could be exposing hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe to coastal flooding due to sea level rise.
When I read about this I immediately thought of the changes to our planet brought about by the Ice Age(s) and then the changes that happened when the ice melted. Of course there were less people on the planet and the affects were not so drastic but the same basic process could be happening to us now. Only now we have so much more to lose. If sea levels do rise and we do experience severe coastal floods there is no telling of the amount of damage and the number of lives this would cause us to lose.
website: http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/08/27/nasa-ocean-level-rising-orig.cnn/video/playlists/digital-studios-topicals/
I'm troubled by the fact that our world is changing for the worse, more so than usual, but I'm glad that people are starting to take global warming seriously after years of existence and years of ignoring it and pretending like it wasn't a thing. I still don't understand how people can claim that global warming doesn't exist. If only we had owned up to it sooner then we could have taken more steps into reversing what we've caused.
ReplyDelete-Shelby Linker, 8th period
We can't reverse global warming, but we can prolong its effects. I think that we've made significant progress in managing the way we treat our Earth (at least, in my lifetime) over the past 30 years. We'll conserve materials and use nonrenewable resources wisely, but the warming of the atmosphere and the rising of the sea is inevitable as long as we're here.
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