Published review about sea level and where it matters
Your Coast Has Its Own Climate
Ask most people how fast sea level is rising, and they will quote a single number: a few millimetres a year, creeping up steadily since satellites started watching the oceans in the early 1990s. It is a tidy story. It is also, for anyone who actually lives on a coast, almost beside the point.
A new review led by Anny Cazenave, geodesist, satellite-altimetry pioneer, and a former ISSI Director herself, pulls together decades of work by an ISSI International Team to make an uncomfortable but important argument: the global average hides almost everything that matters locally. Coastal sea level does not follow the open ocean’s gentle upward line; it lurches, wobbles, and sometimes free-falls, shaped by a crowd of processes that rarely get invited into the headline number.
