Study Suggests Parched Earth Soaks Up Water, Slowing Sea Level Rise
12th February 2016
Is there anything global warming can’t do? Now it seems that there is so much global warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels.
As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday.
Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth’s continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science.
This has temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent, it said.