Figuring out the most realistic projections for sea-level rise: Interview with glaciologist Rob DeConto

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For more, see May 1, 2020 Bulletin interview, “Peter Davis of the British Antarctic Survey on changes in the Thwaites Glacier,” https://thebulletin.org/premium/2020–05/peter-davis-of-the-british-antarctic-survey-on-changes-in-the-thwaites-glacier/.

2. See “The Doomsday Glacier” by Jeff Goodell in May 9, 2017 Rolling Stone https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/the-doomsday-glacier-113792/.

3. For more, see “When glaciers calve: Huge underwater tsunamis found at edge of Antarctica, likely affecting ice melt” by Michael Meredith in the July 2024 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

4. To download a PDF of the relevant part of the IPCC report where the chart appears, see https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf and go to page 22.

5. Richard Alley is a professor of geoscience at the Penn State Ice and Climate Exploration group who has been studying the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland—as well as mountain glaciers—to learn how the ice will change in the future and affect sea-level. More can be found at https://www.ems.psu.edu/profile/faculty/richard-alley.

6. See “The Paris Climate Agreement and future sea-level rise from Antarctica” by DeConto et al in May 4, 2021 issue of Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03427-0.

7. The October 2022 article “A High-End Estimate of Sea Level Rise for Practitioners” by Roderik van de Wal can be found at the American Geophysical Union’s Earth’s Future magazine at https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1029/2022EF002751.

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Notes on contributors

Dan Drollette

Dan Drollette Jr. is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent who has filed stories from every continent except Antarctica. His stories have appeared in Scientific American, International Wildlife, MIT’s Technology Review, Natural History, Cosmos, Science, New Scientist, and the BBC Online, among others. He was a TEDx speaker to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and held a Fulbright Postgraduate Traveling Fellowship to Australia—where he lived for a total of four years. For three years, he edited CERN’s on-line weekly magazine about high-energy subparticle physics, in Geneva, Switzerland, where his office was 100 yards from the injection point of the Large Hadron Collider.