It’s no revelation that sea levels are rising. Rising temperatures brought on by human-caused climate change are melting ice sheets and expanding ocean water. What’s happening inside Earth will also shape future shorelines. Jacky Austermann is trying to understand those inner dynamics.
A geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Austermann didn’t always know she would end up studying climate. Her fascination with math from a young age coupled with her love of nature and the outdoors — she grew up hiking in the Alps — led her to study physics as an undergraduate, and later geophysics.
As Austermann dug deeper into Earth’s geosystems, she learned just how much the movement of hot rock in the mantle influences life on the surface. “I got really interested in this entire interplay of the solid earth and the oceans and the climate,” she says.
Big goal
Much of Austermann’s work focuses on how that interplay influences changes in sea level. The global average sea level has risen more than 20 centimeters since 1880, and the yearly rise is increasing. But shifts in local sea level can vary, with those levels rising or falling along different shorelines, Austermann says, and the solid earth plays a role.
“We think about sea level change generally as ‘ice is melting, so sea level is rising.’ But there’s a lot more nuance to it,” she says. “A lot of sea level change is driven by land motion.”
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