Jonathan Bamber scans his audience – a mix of young scientists-in-training and graybeards – and asks: ‘If I melted the West Antarctic Ice Sheet tomorrow, how much would sea level rise? The answer he typically gets, he continues, ranges from 5 to 7 meters (16 to 23 feet). After all, this has become a kind of canonical range well-grounded in the scientific literature, right? Not so much, it turns out. And therein lies some of the backstory to a study by Dr. Bamber and his Dutch and British colleagues that appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Monitor colleague Moises Velasquez-Manoff has summarized the results here. But if you want to give your web browser a rest, here are the bullet points: ¢ If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) melts, global average sea levels would rise by 3.3 meters. That’s down significantly from the typical estimates. But it still represents an immense creeping disaster, direct and indirect, for more than than 3.2 billion people worldwide who live within 200 miles of a coastline. ¢ The East and West Coasts of North America would see increases 25 percent higher than the global average, Bamber […]