How the climate drives sea-level changes

Abstract

Sea-level change associated with climate change involves various interactions between different components of the Earth system - primarily oceans, ice sheets and the solid Earth. As a consequence, sea-level science is highly multi- and interdisciplinary, requiring collaboration between scientists who measure and model properties of and processes within these various subsystems. This paper provides a broad and cursory glimpse into the processes underlying climate-driven sea-level change. A key message of this paper is that, contrary to popular belief, climate-driven sea-level change is not spatially uniform. This is a doubled-edged sword: it complicates the processes of producing well-constrained estimates of future sea-level rise at regional to local scales, but it provides the opportunity to better understand past climate change through modelling observations of sea-level changes. © 2008 Royal Astronomical Society.