Peter, thanks for reading, and your comment. The urgent timescale I describe — any day now — and the amount of sea level rise — seven meters — comes from a couple of things. One, that, according to NASA, the collapse of the West Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea level by sixteen feet. As a large faction of this, the Thwaites Glacier could shatter within four years.
The loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are widely considered to be accelerating and substantially driven by melting glaciers. It’s all happening at an “unprecedented rate” says the National Snow and Ice Data Center. And according to the recent paper from authors at the University of Exeter, those tipping points you mention are in the offing. So, indeed, in a matter of a few years, maybe even less, we will quite possibly see dramatic sea level rise.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1071-0
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/05/world/thwaites-doomsday-glacier-sea-level-climate
Edit: having given it a lot of thought, I've changed "any day now" to "any year now."
Best wishes,
TJ
