I actually just attended an incredibly interesting seminar about sea level rise! (ChemE grad student: the our department required it. It was way cooler than wat

I actually just attended an incredibly interesting seminar about sea level rise! (ChemE grad student: the our department required it. It was way cooler than watching yet another presentation about catalysis!) Based on what I saw, I think it's wrong to think of the ocean level as ONLY rising or ONLY sinking. Sort of like how its wrong to call global climate change "global warming": climates are complicated, and some places may end up cooler in the brave new world even if the global average is rising. Besides the raw amount of water in the ocean, lots of other factors go into sea level rise. Some surprised me! A few interesting ones I remember: - thermal expansion of the water: i.e. increasing the temperature of a constant amount of water causes its volume to increase - rising or sinking land: in places like Norway or Greenland, the land is rising from all the glaciers melting. He talked about some piers he saw in Northern Europe many meters away from the seaside. - flow of ocean currents: the ocean isn't a big bathtub, all the water is moving around. The movement causes the water to rise in some places and go down in others - additional gravity stuff that I didn't understand. Among many fascinating figures, he plotted where the sea level rise would be the most dramatic, and the US East Coast was one of the worst in the world. Besides the general rise in sea level affecting most of the planet, something in the ocean currents causes the water to be especially high over there.