Study suggests rising sea levels may hit Incheon harder

The consequences of melting glaciers may hit Korea’s west coast city harder than the rest of the world, a local polar research team found.

Melting icebergs by the coast of Greenland [SHUTTERSTOCK]

The consequences of melting glaciers may hit Korea’s west coast city harder than the rest of the world, a local polar research team found.

While the world’s sea level is expected to rise by 3.6 centimeters (1.4 inches) by 2050 on average due to melting glaciers, the coastline of Incheon, a metropolitan city just west of Seoul, will likely rise by 4 centimeters, according to the Korea Polar Research Institute (Kopri) on Wednesday.

The predicted rise in sea level was the steepest for Incheon compared to other major coastal cities across the globe, including London, Sydney, and New York.

Such findings were made by a research team led by Lee Won-sang, Kopri’s director of glacial environment research, by analyzing changes in the glacier volume in Antarctica and Greenland observed by satellites since 2007.

Lee and his colleagues predicted the potential losses in glacier volume, which has been steadily declining for the past 30 years, and calculated its impact on the global sea level.

As the loss in ice mass was forecast to result in lower sea levels near Greenland and Antarctica due to the consequent decrease in gravitational force, the sea level is estimated to rise even sharper the farther out in the ocean in response.

The project marks the first deliberate prediction on the ice-mass losses’ regional impact on the global sea level conducted by a Korean research team, according to Kopri.

The study was published in the Environmental Research Letters journal in December.

“Coastal countries at mid and low latitudes, including Korea, will bear the brunt of the rise in sea level caused by melting glaciers in the polar regions,” said Lee.

Kim Byeong-Hoon, a postdoctoral researcher at Kopri, warned that “as the study’s findings represent a minimal sea level rise estimated based only on the loss of glacier mass, the actual consequence may be even more severe if we fail to meet the 1.5-degree global warming limit target.”

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]