evidence: "Early-stage [sea level rise] was driven primarily by warming of the atmosphere due to increased CO2," he says. "But more and more, we see sea level rise being driven by different kinds of feedbacks within the system. Nowadays, the majority of sea level rise that we get both in Greenland and Antarctica is primarily driven by heat within the ocean—and that's not necessarily the ocean warming up directly because of ongoing climate change. It's more about shifting patterns of winds that are moving deep warm water around and causing it to come into contact with the glaciers." [...] Farther in the future, the differences between the best- and worst-case scenarios grow even starker. Unlike world temperatures, sea level rise responds slowly to climate change, and we can confidently expect that the oceans will keep rising long after we stop all our climate pollution. By the year 2300, even with strong action to control climate change this century, we could plausibly see a meter or more of sea level rise; in the worst case, the seas could rise a staggering 10 meters (33 feet) or more. Over the centuries, the chances of Antarctic ice sheets collapsing also rise. "On a long enough timeline, we lose virtually all ice on Earth," Minchew says. "Over geological timescales, it’s rare to have ice sheets at the poles."