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www.sea-technology.com July 2015 / st 41 A t the Pennsylvania State University, researchers are tak- ing a look at how the Greenland ice sheet impacts ris- ing sea levels. Though their work is delving into long-term changes, small shifts over time are compounded by ever more frequent natural disasters. Sea Technology spoke to Patrick Applegate, research associate at Penn State's Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, about what is causing sea level rise and why we should be paying attention to the Greenland ice sheet. How do natural disasters, like Hurricane Sandy, play into your work? What we are looking at is the rise in sea level over a long period of time. When you have a hurricane like Sandy, tem- porary rise from the storm surge stacks on top of that long- term rise. This allows places to be fooded that normally would have been safe from temporary sea level rise. There has been about a foot of sea level rise in New York City over the last hundred years. When you take a storm like San- dy, and you stack its storm surge on top of the 1-foot rise, that water can go places that it couldn't go before. What we are looking at is the long-term rise, but that really matters for people in the relatively short term. How big of a role are ice sheets expected to play in sea level rise? The right answer is that we don't know. It's actually hard to say. As time goes on, and as our work is suggesting, it looks like ice sheets could be really important for future sea level rise. We are looking in particular at the Greenland ice sheet. What our computer models suggest is that the Greenland ice sheet might be more sensitive to temperature change than we had thought, because of the way the ice sheet sys- tem behaves. In that case, we might get more sea level rise than we previously believed. Could you tell us a little bit more about why the Greenland ice sheet is special? There is the Greenland ice sheet, and then there are the Antarctic ice sheets in the South- Greenland Ice Sheet to Play Important Role in Understanding Sea Level Rise (Photo Credit: U.S. Navy) (Photo Credit: NOAA/ Collection of Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colon, Chief Scientist National Ice Center.) (Top) A team of scientists from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, explores the waters near the Helheim Glacier in Greenland before using an autonomous undersea vehicle to study glacial ice melt. (Bottom) Sun seen through the clouds over late summer ice foes.