Oceans

NASA: World ‘locked into’ at least 3 feet of sea level rise

August 27, 2015 by Nasheman

Current satellite data reveals that glaciers ‘might not be as stable as we once thought’

Photo: NASA/Saskia Madlener

by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams

New research underway indicates that at least three feet of global sea level rise is near certain, NASA scientists warned Wednesday.

That’s the higher range of the 1 to 3 feet level of rise the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave in its 2013 assessment.

Sea levels have already risen 3 inches on average since 1992, with some areas experiencing as much as a 9-inch rise.

“Given what we know now about how the ocean expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the seas, it’s pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet of sea level rise, and probably more,” said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and lead of NASA’s interdisciplinary Sea Level Change Team. “But we don’t know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer.”

The Greenland ice sheet has contributed more greatly to sea level rise, losing an average of 303 gigatons of ice a year over the past decade, while the Antarctic ice sheet has lost an average of 118 gigatons a year. But scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine warned last year that glaciers in the West Antarctic “have passed the point of no return.”

Glaciologist Eric Rignot of the UC-Irvine and NASA’s JPL, and lead author of the West Antarctic study, stated Wednesday that East Antarctica’s ice sheet remains a wildcard.

“The prevailing view among specialists has been that East Antarctica is stable, but we don’t really know,” Rignot stated. “Some of the signs we see in the satellite data right now are red flags that these glaciers might not be as stable as we once thought.”

Exactly how much rise will happen and when is uncertain, they say. “We’ve seen from the paleoclimate record that sea level rise of as much as 10 feet in a century or two is possible, if the ice sheets fall apart rapidly,” said Tom Wagner, the cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We’re seeing evidence that the ice sheets are waking up, but we need to understand them better before we can say we’re in a new era of rapid ice loss.”

A World on Fire: July was hottest month ever recorded

August 21, 2015 by Nasheman

Record set for hottest month of the year puts 2015 on track to be hottest year ever recorded… and the consequences are mounting

Firefighters work to dig a fire line on the Rocky Fire in Lake County, California July 30, 2015. This week, three scientific agencies announced that July was the hottest month on Earth since records were started in 1880. (Photo: Reuters/Max Whittaker)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

The world is burning up.

The previously available evidence for that statement is staggering and on Thursday the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. announced that July was the hottest month the planet has ever experience since records began and that both land and ocean temperatures are on pace to make 2015 the hottest year ever recorded.

According to NOAA’s latest figures, the July average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.46°F (0.81°C) above the 20^th century average. As July consistently marks the warmest month of the year, NOAA said this most recent one now registers as having the all-time highest monthly temperature since records began in 1880, with an average global thermometer reading of 61.86°F (16.61°C).

NOAA’s temperature analysis follows on the heals of similar findings by both NASA and theJapan Meteorological Agency (JMA) published earlier this week which also said July was a record-breaker in terms of heat.

“The world is warming. It is continuing to warm. That is being shown time and time again in our data,” said Jake Crouch, physical scientist at NOAA’s National Centres for Environmental Information.

“Now that we are fairly certain that 2015 will be the warmest year on record,” Crouch continued, “It is time to start looking at what are the impacts of that? What does that mean for people on the ground?”

At least for those who experience perilous heat waves in places like Pakistan, India, and Egypt in recent weeks and months, they know those direct impacts can be deadly. And climate scientists have spent much of the year—with a special eye on upcoming UN climate talks in Paris—warning that the collective impacts of increased temperatures, both on land and in the oceans, are resulting in severe consequences for human civilization and the natural world.

More troubling than any one month, experts notes, is the consistent and driving trend that has seen temperatures on a steady march upward since the beginning of the century. As Andrea Thompson at Climate Central reports:

After 2014 was declared the warmest year on record, a Climate Central analysisshowed that 13 of the 15 warmest years in the books have occurred since 2000 and that the odds of that happening randomly without the boost of global warming was 1 in 27 million.

Even during recent years when a La Niña (the cold water counterpart to El Niño) has been in place, the year turned out warmer than El Niño years of earlier decades.

Global carbon dioxide levels have risen from a preindustrial level of about 280 parts per million to nearly 400 ppm today. In recent years, CO2 levels — the primary greenhouse gas — have spent longer and longer above the 400 ppm benchmark. They stayed above this point for about six months this year, twice the three months of last year. It is expected that within a few years, they will be permanently above 400 ppm.

The continued rise of CO2 levels will raise the planet’s temperature by another 3°F to 9°F by the end of this century depending on when and if greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, scientists have calculated.

That means that some, future years are likely to continue to set records, even if there will still be year to year variations.

And according to Eric Holthaus, who writes about climate change for Slate, the mounting evidence and rising temperatures are painting an increasingly scary picture of the future:

All this warmth on land is being driven by record-setting heat across large sections of the world’s oceans. The NOAA report notes that the warmest 10 months of ocean temperatures on record have occurred in the last 16 months. This is mostly due to a near-record strength El Niño, but the current state of the global oceans has little historical precedent. Since it takes several months for the oceanic warmth of an El Niño to fully reach the atmosphere, 2016 will likely be warmer—perhaps much warmer—than 2015. And that poses grave implications for the world’s ecosystems as well as humans.

We’ve recently entered a new point in the Earth’s climate history. According toreconstructions using tree rings, corals, and ice cores, global temperatures are currently approaching—if not already past—the maximum temperatures commonly observed over the past 11,000 years (i.e., the time period in which humans developed agriculture), and flirting with levels not seen in more than 100,000 years.

But this is the scary part: The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any point since humans first evolved millions of years ago. Since carbon dioxide emissions lead to warming, the fact that emissions are increasing means there’s much more warming yet to come. What’s more, carbon dioxide levels are increasing really quickly. The rate of change is faster than at any point in Earth’s entire 4.5 billion year history, likely 10 times faster than during Earth’s worst mass extinction—the “Great Dying”—in which more than 90 percent of ocean species perished. Our planet has simply never undergone the kind of stress we’re currently putting on it. That stunning rate of change is one reason why surprising studies like the recent worse-than-the-worst-case-scenario study on sea level rise don’t seem so far fetched.

World’s oceans could rise higher, sooner, faster than most thought possible

July 22, 2015 by Nasheman

New research shows that consensus estimates of sea level increases may be underestimating threat; new predictions would see major coastal cities left uninhabitable by next century

‘Roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable.’ (Image: Woodbine)

by Jon Queally, Common Dreams

If a new scientific paper is proven accurate, the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible.

According to the new study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was written by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other prominent climate researchers—current predictions about the catastrophic impacts of global warming, the melting of vast ice sheets, and sea level rise do not take into account the feedback loop implications of what will occur if large sections of Greenland and the Antarctic are consumed by the world’s oceans.

A summarized draft of the full report was released to journalists on Monday, with the shocking warning that such glacial melting will “likely” occur this century and could cause as much as a ten foot sea-level rise in as little as fifty years. Such a prediction is much more severe than current estimates contained in reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the UN-sponsored body that represents the official global consensus of the scientific community.

“If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid large scale ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise of at least several meters,” the paper states.

Separately, the researchers conclude that “continued high emissions will make multi-meter sea level rise practically unavoidable and likely to occur this century. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”

The Daily Beast‘s Mark Hertsgaard, who attended a press call with Dr. Hansen on Monday, reports that the work presented by the researchers is

warning that humanity could confront “sea level rise of several meters” before the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are slashed much faster than currently contemplated.

This roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable. “Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water,” Hansen said, “but you couldn’t live there.”

This apocalyptic scenario illustrates why the goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius is not the safe “guardrail” most politicians and media coverage imply it is, argue Hansen and 16 colleagues in a blockbuster study they are publishing this week in the peer-reviewed journal Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry. On the contrary, a 2C future would be “highly dangerous.”

If Hansen is right—and he has been right, sooner, about the big issues in climate science longer than anyone—the implications are vast and profound.

In the call with reporters, Hansen explained that time is of the essence, given the upcoming climate talks in Paris this year and the grave consequences the world faces if bold, collective action is not taken immediately. “We have a global crisis that calls for international cooperation to reduce emissions as rapidly as practical,” the paper states.

Hansen said he has long believed that many of the existing models were under-estimating the potential impacts of ice sheet melting, and told the Daily Beast: “Now we have evidence to make that statement based on much more than suspicion.”

Though he acknowledged the publication of the paper was unorthodox, Hansen told reporters that the research itself is “substantially more persuasive than anything previously published.”

For his part, Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist who writes about weather and climate for Slate, said the “bombshell” findings are both credible and terrifying. Holthaus writes:

To come to their findings, the authors used a mixture of paleoclimate records, computer models, and observations of current rates of sea level rise, but “the real world is moving somewhat faster than the model,” Hansen says.

[…] The implications are mindboggling: In the study’s likely scenario, New York City—and every other coastal city on the planet—may only have a few more decades of habitability left. That dire prediction, in Hansen’s view, requires “emergency cooperation among nations.”

In response to the paper, climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University affirmed: “If we cook the planet long enough at about two degrees warming, there is likely to be a staggering amount of sea level rise. Key questions are when would greenhouse-gas emissions lock in this sea level rise and how fast would it happen? The latter point is critical to understanding whether and how we would be able to deal with such a threat.”

The new research, Oppenheimer added, “takes a stab at answering the ‘how soon?’ question but we remain largely in the dark. Giving the state of uncertainty and the high risk, humanity better get its collective foot off the accelerator.”

And as the Daily Beast‘s Hertsgaard notes, Hansen’s track record on making climate predictions should command respect from people around the world. The larger question, however, is whether humanity has the capacity to act.

“The climate challenge has long amounted to a race between the imperatives of science and the contingencies of politics,” Hertsgaard concludes. “With Hansen’s paper, the science has gotten harsher, even as the Nature Climate Change study affirms that humanity can still choose life, if it will. The question now is how the politics will respond—now, at Paris in December, and beyond.”

Eight million tonnes of plastic are going into the ocean each year

February 16, 2015 by Nasheman

by Britta Denise Hardesty & Chris Wilcox, The Conversation

Plastic waste washed up on a beach in Haiti. Timothy Townsend

You might have heard the oceans are full of plastic, but how full exactly? Around 8 million metric tonnes go into the oceans each year, according to the first rigorous global estimate published in Science today.

That’s equivalent to 16 shopping bags full of plastic for every metre of coastline (excluding Antarctica). By 2025 we will be putting enough plastic in the ocean (on our most conservative estimates) to cover 5% of the earth’s entire surface in cling film each year.

Around a third of this likely comes from China, and 10% from Indonesia. In fact all but one of the top 20 worst offenders are developing nations, largely due to fast-growing economies but poor waste management systems.

However, people in the United States – coming in at number 20 and producing less than 1% of global waste – produce more than 2.5 kg of plastic waste each day, more than twice the amount of people in China.

While the news for us, our marine wildlife, seabirds, and fisheries is not good, the research paves the way to improve global waste management and reduce plastic in the waste stream.

Lindsay Robinson/University of Georgia

Follow the plastic

An international team of experts analysed 192 countries bordering the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean and Black Seas. By examining the amount of waste produced per person per year in each country, the percentage of that waste that’s plastic, and the percentage of that plastic waste that is mismanaged, the team worked out the likely worst offenders for marine plastic waste.

In 2010, 270 million tonnes of plastic was produced around the world. This translated to 275 million tonnes of plastic waste; 99.5 million tonnes of which was produced by the two billion people living within 50 km of a coastline. Because some durable items such as refrigerators produced in the past are also thrown away, we can find more waste than plastic produced at times.

Of that, somewhere between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes found its way into the ocean. Given how light plastic is, this translates to an unimaginably large volume of debris.

While plastic can make its way into oceans from land-locked countries via rivers, these were excluded in the study, meaning the results are likely a conservative estimate.

With our planet still 85 years away from “peak waste” — and with plastic production skyrocketing around the world — the amount of plastic waste getting into the oceans is likely to increase by an order of magnitude within the next decade.

Our recent survey of the Australian coastline found three-quarters of coastal rubbish is plastic, averaging more than 6 pieces per meter of coastline. Offshore, we found densities from a few thousand pieces of plastic to more than 40,000 pieces per square kilometre in the waters around the continent.

Where is the plastic going?

While we now have a rough figure for the amount of plastic rubbish in the world’s oceans, we still know very little about where it all ends up (it isn’t all in the infamous “Pacific Garbage Patch”).

Between 6,350 and 245,000 metric tons of plastic waste is estimated to float on the ocean’s surface, which raises the all-important question: where does the rest of it end up?

Some, like the plastic microbeads found in many personal care products, ends up in the oceans and sediments where they can be ingested by bottom-dwelling creatures and filter-feeders.

It’s unclear where the rest of the material is. It might be deposited on coastal margins, or maybe it breaks down into fragments so small we can’t detect it, or maybe it is in the guts of marine wildlife.

Plastic recovered from a dead shearwater – a glowstick, industrial plastic pellets, and bits of balloon CSIRO, Author provided

Wherever it ends up, plastic has enormous potential for destruction. Ghost nets and fishing debris snag and drown turtles, seals, and other marine wildlife. In some cases, these interactions have big impacts.

For instance, we estimate that around 10,000 turtles have been trapped by derelict nets in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria region alone.

More than 690 marine species are known to interact with marine litter. Turtles mistake floating plastic for jellyfish, and globally around one-third of all turtles are estimated to have eaten plastic in some form. Likewise seabirds eat everything from plastic toys, nurdles and balloon shreds to foam, fishing floats and glow sticks.

While plastic is prized for its durability and inertness, it also acts as a chemical magnet for environmental pollutants such as metals, fertilisers, and persistent organic pollutants. These are adsorbed onto the plastic. When an animal eats the plastic “meal”, these chemicals make their way into their tissues and — in the case of commercial fish species — can make it onto our dinner plates.

Plastic waste is the scourge of our oceans; killing our wildlife, polluting our beaches, and threatening our food security. But there are solutions – some of which are simple, and some a bit more challenging.

Solutions

If the top five plastic-polluting countries – China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka – managed to achieve a 50% improvement in their waste management — for example by investing in waste management infrastructure, the total global amount of mismanaged waste would be reduced by around a quarter.

Higher-income countries have equal responsibility to reduce the amount of waste produced per person through measures such as plastic recycling and reuse, and by shifting some of the responsibility for plastic waste back onto the producers.

The simplest and most effective solution might be to make the plastic worth money. Deposits on beverage containers for instance, have proven effective at reducing waste lost into the environment – because the containers, plastic and otherwise, are worth money people don’t throw them away, or if they do others pick them up.

Extending this idea to a deposit on all plastics at the beginning of their lifecycle, as raw materials, would incentivize collection by formal waste managers where infrastructure is available, but also by consumers and entrepreneurs seeking income where it is not.

Before the plastic revolution, much of our waste was collected and burned. But the ubiquity, volume, and permanence of plastic waste demands better solutions.

Britta Denise Hardesty is a Senior Research Scientist, Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship at CSIRO, and Chris Wilcox is a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO.

Humans have brought world's oceans to brink of 'major extinction event'

January 17, 2015 by Nasheman

But ‘proactive intervention’ could still avert marine disaster, researchers find

“Although defaunation has been less severe in the oceans than on land, our effects on marine animals are increasing in pace and impact,” the researchers write. (Photo: Phil’s 1stPix/flickr/cc)

by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams

Marine wildlife at all levels of the food chain has been badly damaged by human activity, says a new report that urges immediate and “meaningful rehabilitation” if we are to avert mass extinction in the world’s oceans.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an author of the study, told the New York Times.

The report, published Thursday in the journal Science, finds that habitat loss, mismanagement of oceanic resources, climate change, and the overall “footprint of human ocean use” have resulted in a phenomenon known as “defaunation”—a decline in animal species diversity and abundance.

“Although defaunation has been less severe in the oceans than on land, our effects on marine animals are increasing in pace and impact,” reads the study abstract. “Humans have caused few complete extinctions in the sea, but we are responsible for many ecological, commercial, and local extinctions. Despite our late start, humans have already powerfully changed virtually all major marine ecosystems.”

“Humans have profoundly decreased the abundance of both large (e.g., whales) and small (e.g., anchovies) marine fauna,” it continues. “Such declines can generate waves of ecological change that travel both up and down marine food webs and can alter ocean ecosystem functioning.”

Just as the Industrial Revolution during the 1800s decimated the huge tracts of forests, driving many terrestrial species to extinction, industrial use of the oceans threatens to destroy marine habitats and in turn damage the health of marine wildlife populations.

Report co-author Steve Palumbi of Stanford University listed several emerging threats to the oceans: “There are factory farms in the sea and cattle-ranch-style feed lots for tuna. Shrimp farms are eating up mangroves with an appetite akin to that of terrestrial farming, which consumed native prairies and forest. Stakes for seafloor mining claims are being pursued with gold-rush-like fervor, and 300-ton ocean mining machines and 750-foot fishing boats are now rolling off the assembly line to do this work.”

Timeline (log scale) of marine and terrestrial defaunation. If left unmanaged, the authors predict that marine habitat alteration, along with climate change (colored bar: IPCC warming), will exacerbate marine defaunation. (Credit: Science)

“Human activities are negatively impacting the ocean at an ever increasing and unsustainable rate, and we must freeze the footprints of industrial activities and commercial fishing,” Oceana marine scientist Amanda Keledjian told Common Dreams. “Oceana applauds these researchers for their work, because assessing the oceans from a holistic perspective is the only way to understand the scope at which we must act to reverse collapsing fisheries and continued habitat degradation.”

According to the Times:

Scientific assessments of the oceans’ health are dogged by uncertainty: It’s much harder for researchers to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles, than to track the health of a species on land. And changes that scientists observe in particular ocean ecosystems may not reflect trends across the planet.

Dr. [Malin L.] Pinsky, Dr. McCauley and their colleagues sought a clearer picture of the oceans’ health by pulling together data from an enormous range of sources, from discoveries in the fossil record to statistics on modern container shipping, fish catches and seabed mining. While many of the findings already existed, they had never been juxtaposed in such a way.

A number of experts said the result was a remarkable synthesis, along with a nuanced and encouraging prognosis.

“I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea,” said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.

The report authors say the effects of human activity in the ocean are still reversible: “Proactive intervention can avert a marine defaunation disaster of the magnitude observed on land.”

Oceana’s Keledjian echoed that appeal. “This study reminds us that it is critical to do everything we can to protect vulnerable species and the ocean ecosystems on which they depend,” she said. “While much remains unknown about the state of the oceans, we cannot wait to act until we know with 100 percent certainty that extinctions and devastation are upon us, because that will already be far too late.”

Ten years after the Boxing Day tsunami, are coasts any safer?

December 27, 2014 by Nasheman

The day after: a Sri Lankan man begins the slow process of rebuilding. EPA/Mike Nelson

by Emily Heath, The Conversation

Ten years ago we witnessed one of the worst natural disasters in history, when a huge earthquake off the coast of Sumatra triggered a devastating tsunami which swept across the Indian Ocean.

An estimated 230,000 people lost their lives, and 1.6 million people lost their homes or livelihoods.

The impact was greatest in northern Sumatra because of its proximity to the earthquake. Catastrophic shaking was followed within minutes by the full force of the tsunami.

Avoidable deaths

Thousands of people were also killed in distant countries, where the earthquake could not be felt. If they had received a warning of the approaching tsunami, they could have moved inland, uphill or out to sea, and survived. Tsunami take several hours to cross an ocean, becoming much larger and slower as they reach the coast.

Back in 2004 there were long-established tsunami warning systems in the Pacific Ocean, which has many subduction zones – places where two tectonic plates collide – capable of generating huge earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.

Other regions, including the Indian Ocean, did not have a warning system. The probability of a major tsunami was judged to be too low to justify the cost, especially for poorer countries.

The Boxing Day 2004 disaster changed all that.

Progress in the past decade

In early 2005, the UN agreed to develop an international warning system including regional systems in the Indian Ocean, North East Atlantic & Mediterranean, and Caribbean. The Indian Ocean tsunami warning system was developed between 2006 and 2013, at a total cost of at least $19 million.

Japan has installed more buoys in the wake of its own 2011 disaster. NOAA

In the three years prior to October 2014, bulletins were issued about 23 Indian Ocean earthquakes, resulting in a small number of potentially life-saving coastal evacuations. Most of these 23 earthquakes did not actually generate a threatening tsunami because they did not cause significant uplift or subsidence of the seafloor. But false alarms can provide reassurance that communications work well, or highlight weaknesses.

Communications and evacuation procedures are also regularly tested by international mock drills, often based on worst case scenarios.

How do tsunami warning systems work?

All warning systems work in the same general way. First, a network of broadband seismometers detects the seismic waves generated by an earthquake, which travel at speeds of several kilometres per second. When several seismometers have detected the seismic waves, the location and approximate magnitude of the earthquake can be computed. If the epicentre is under water and the magnitude large (greater than 6.5 on the Richter, or moment magnitude, scale) a tsunami bulletin, watch or warning is issued to local communication centres, ideally within three minutes of the earthquake. If the epicentre is nearby and the probability of a tsunami is high, evacuation procedures will be initiated immediately.

If all else fails, follow the signs. Kallerna, CC BY-SA

Otherwise, local centres will standby for confirmation of whether a tsunami has actually been generated. Confirmation comes within about 30-60 minutes, using a network of tsunami buoys and seafloor pressure recorders. These detect the series of waves (usually less than a couple of metres high and travelling at about 800 km/h) in the open ocean, and transmit the data by satellite to a regional control centre.

Tsunami warnings reach the public via TV, radio, email, text messages, sirens and loudspeakers. You can sign up to receive tsunami alerts anywhere in the world by SMS on your mobile phone, thanks to a not-for-profit humanitarian service called CWarn.org.

Many high-risk areas also have signage to alert people to “natural” warnings (such as strong shaking or a sudden withdrawal of the sea), and direct them to higher ground.

Limitations of warning systems

The Pacific and Japanese warning systems helped to ensure the major tsunami generated off the coast of Japan on 11 March 2011 caused far fewer deaths (15,000) than the 2004 disaster. However, it showed that even a wealthy and well-prepared nation such as Japan cannot fully protect people from extreme hazards, and that warning systems can sometimes lead to a false sense of security.

Japan, 2011: fewer lives were lost but the damage was immense Chief Hira, CC BY-SA

The slow rupture of the subduction zone near Japan meant the initial warnings underestimated the magnitude of the earthquake and resulting tsunami. Many people did not move to higher ground in the vital few minutes after receiving the warning, because they wrongly assumed the tsunami would be stopped by 5-10 m high sea walls.

Japan has learned from this tragedy and, among other things, made changes to tsunami warning messages, improved coastal defences, and installed more seismometers and tsunami buoys.

Will more tsunami disasters occur?

It is impossible to predict exactly when or where the next major tsunami will occur. They are very rare events in our limited historical record. But by dating prehistoric tsunami deposits, we can see that major tsunamis happen on average every few hundred years in many coastal regions.

Future tsunami disasters are inevitable, but with better technology, education and governance we can realistically hope that a loss of life on the scale of the 2004 tsunami disaster will not happen again.

Emily Heath is a Senior Teaching Associate, Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University.

NASA: World ‘locked into’ at least 3 feet of sea level rise

A World on Fire: July was hottest month ever recorded

World’s oceans could rise higher, sooner, faster than most thought possible

Eight million tonnes of plastic are going into the ocean each year

Humans have brought world's oceans to brink of 'major extinction event'

Ten years after the Boxing Day tsunami, are coasts any safer?

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