ABSTRACT
Climatic warming can affect sea levels in three main ways. Differences in wind patterns may change the frequency and severity of high water levels caused by storm surges. Warmer conditions will cause a rise in mean sea level due to the thermal expansion of sea water. The existence of so many short-term variations of considerable amplitude helps explain the difficulty of identifying long-term changes. The Greenland ice cap is much greater in extent and there is uncertainty as to whether its mass balance has changed significantly in the last century, though some scientists believe that recent climatic warming has produced a negative mass balance with a net loss by melting and calving. Measurement of eustatic sea level change is more difficult than might be imagined. Tide gauges are far from uniformly scattered around the world’s coasts. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps between them contain 99 per cent of the world’s ice.
