The sea level is rising, but it’s not rising evenly. Over the 20th century, the water lapping New York City climbed 1.5 times faster than the global average, according to a report published last year. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you imagine sea levels rising like water in a tub. So Verge Science set out to discover what’s going on.
Big picture, this story is set against a backdrop of climbing global temperatures, which do a couple of things to the sea. Land ice melts and dribbles into the ocean, causing water levels to rise. Warmer waters also expand. “And that causes some amount of sea level rise as well,” says Andrea Dutton, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida.
Here’s the weird part: different parts of the ocean are at different heights. “It turns out that on the surface of the ocean today, the surface is not perfectly flat,” Dutton says. She told us there are hills and valleys wrinkling the ocean’s surface, currents that could pile water up against the East Coast of the US if freshwater from melting ice jams up the circulation, and land masses that are still settling back into place after a massive ice sheet began melting thousands of years ago.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
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