Cities Around The World Will Submerge Due To Climate Change, NASA Tool Predicts Which Ones

NASA has developed a new forecasting tool that can predict which cities will be affected as different portions of ice sheets melt due to global warming.

Also read: NASA Predicts Mangalore & Mumbai To Be First Indian Cities To Submerge Due To Climate Change

Reuters

The tool has been developed by scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the study was released on advances.sciencemag.org.

The instrument called the gradient fingerprint mapping (GFM), will look at earths spins and gravitational effects to predict how water will be "redistributed" globally.

"This provides, for each city, a picture of which glaciers, ice sheets, and ice caps are of specific importance," researchers said.

According to NASA, these are the ten cities that will face the brunt of melting ice caps:

1. Tokyo

Reuters

GFM shows that the sea-level rise for the next ten years in Tokyo stands at 1.75cm, in the next hundred years it can go up to 17.55cm, making it the most vulnerable city.

2. Port Moresby

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Port Moresby, the sprawling capital of Papua New Guinea, might have 1.74cm local sea-level increase according to the GFM, and 17.49cm rise over 100 years. This'll make it the second most dangerous place after Tokyo.

3. Colombo

BCCL

The GFM measure for the next ten years here stands at 1.68 cms and the effects of global warming will increase the local sea-levels to up to 16.83cms over the next 100 years.

4. Shanghai

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In Shanghai the glacier melt will raise sea-levels to 1.66cms in the next 10 years and up to 16.60cm in a century.

5. Hong Kong

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Sea-level rise prediction by the gradient fingerprint mapping (GFM) for 10 years is 1.65cm and 16.52 in 100 years.

6. Mangalore

BCCL

Glacial melt could push up Mangalore sea levels by 15.98cm compared and 1.52cm in the ten years.

7. Mumbai

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As compared to Mangalore, the sea-level rise in Mumbai stands at 15.26cm after 100 years.

8. Kakinada

This photo of Kakinada Beach is courtesy of TripAdvisor

Melting glaciers can push up sea levels for 293 major port cities, including Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh which stands at 15.16 cm.

9. Chittagong

Reuters

While the levels seem fairly low, yet it poses a considerable amount of risk, in the next ten years it could rise by 1.4cm to 14.01cm in ten years.

10. New York

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New York needs to worry about certain parts of Greenland collapsing, but not so much others.

"As cities and countries attempt to build plans to mitigate flooding, they have to be thinking about 100 years in the future and they want to assess risk in the same way that insurance companies do," said Erik Ivins, senior scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.

sealevel.nasa.gov

Three key processes influenced "the sea-level fingerprint," the pattern of sea-level change around the world, according to the study published in the journal Science Advances.

These include gravity, "push-pull influence" of ice, and the rotation of the planet itself.

¡°By exhaustively mapping these fingerprint gradients, we form a new diagnosis tool, henceforth referred to as gradient fingerprint mapping (GFM), that readily allows for improved assessments of future coastal inundation or emergence,¡± the study said.

It suggests that in London sea-level rise could be significantly affected by changes in the north-western part of the Greenland ice sheet.

For New York, the area of concern is the ice sheets entire northern and eastern portions, researchers said.

According to the Washington Post, the research does not take into account all aspects of sea level rise. Shifting ocean currents can redistribute the mass of the oceans and change sea level, for instance, and as global warming progresses, states the report.