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.
The project of ISSI Team 524 dives into how changes in the open ocean influence coastal sea levels. Through coastal altimetry, tide gauge data, and advanced model simulations, this research uncovers key insights on sea-level fluctuations that impact both local shores and broader coastal systems globally.
