Title: Modeling Sea Level Rise | Learn Science at Scitable
Headings: Modeling Sea Level Rise
Modeling Sea Level Rise
Introduction: Lessons from the Past
Physical Models
Semi-Empirical Models
Local Sea Level Changes
Long-Term Rise
Impacts of Sea Level Rise
Acknowledgement.
References and Recommended Reading

Content: Mass addition comes primarily from melting land ice, i.e. from mountain glaciers, small ice caps and the big ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. Melting sea ice hardly affects global sea level, since it already floats on the sea displacing water corresponding to its weight (Archimedes' principle). Mass addition (or removal) can to some extent also come from water stored on land in liquid form, e.g. from storage of water in human-built reservoirs, which corresponds to about 3 cm worth of sea level (Chao et al. 2008), or from pumping up water from deep aquifers for irrigation purposes which ends up in the ocean (Wada et al. 2010). (iii) By changing the depths of the global ocean basins by movements of the Earth's crust. This is a very long-term process of lesser relevance on the century time scale, but it is currently estimated as causing a drop in sea level at a rate of 3 cm per century due to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), i.e. the ongoing adjustment process of the Earth's crust after the big ice sheets of the last Ice Age have disappeared. We will discuss local sea level changes in a separate section below. Of these key processes, thermal expansion can be modeled with 3-dimensional ocean circulation models, a standard component of coupled climate models. The crucial factor is how fast heat penetrates from the surface into the ocean, and where.