20 October 2025

Rising Seas And Sinking Cities Signal A Coastal Crisis In China

Eurasia Review

A team of scientists led by Rutgers researchers has uncovered evidence that modern sea level rise is happening faster than at any time in the past 4,000 years, with China’s coastal cities especially at risk.

The scientists examined thousands of geological records from a number of sources, including ancient coral reefs and mangroves, which serve as natural archives of past sea levels. They reconstructed sea level changes going back nearly 12,000 years, which marks the beginning of the current geological epoch, the Holocene, which followed the last major ice age.

Reporting in Nature, their findings show that since 1900, global sea levels have risen at an average rate of 1.5 millimeters (or about one-sixteenth of an inch) a year, a pace that exceeds any century-long period in the past four millennia.

“The global mean sea level rise rate since 1900 is the fastest rate over at least the last four millennia,” said Yucheng Lin, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers and is a scientist at Australia’s national research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Hobart.

Lin studied with Robert Kopp, a Distinguished Professor with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences. “Dr Lin’s work illustrates how geological data can help us better understand the hazards that coastal cities face today,” said Kopp, who also authored the study.

Two major forces, thermal expansion and melting glaciers, are driving this acceleration, Lin said. As the planet warms because of climate change, oceans absorb heat and expand. At the same time, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, adding more water to the oceans.

“Getting warmer makes your ocean take up more volume,” Lin said. “And the glaciers respond faster because they are smaller than the ice sheets, which are often the size of continents. We are seeing more and more acceleration in Greenland now.”

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