Short-Lived Greenhouse Gases Like Methane And Chlorofluorocarbons Can Push Sea Levels For Hundreds of Years

Even though, there comes a time when the ecosystem of the earth completely put an end on the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the island countries, and coastal provinces will still experience mounting sea levels for hundreds of centuries afterward, suggested a new climatic research, conducted by a team of scientists at MIT and Simon Fraser University. The potential contribution of climate change to the rising level of the sea is clearly highlighted in the new study published in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this week.

According to the study, the temperature sourced from short-term greenhouse gases of the environment, such as methane, chlorofluorocarbons, or hydrofluorocarbons, can keep prompting the sea level to upward, even after the world stop emitting them into the atmosphere. In the study paper, the researcher also suggested that the short-lived gases like methane and chlorofluorocarbons will hang back in the environment just for few more decades and after that, the earth will bring their discharge to a halt into the atmosphere. However, even after this, they can influence the sea levels to go up for many hundred years. It means, no matter if the environment has pollutants or not, the mounting intensity of the sea level in coastal locations will go on for centuries to come.

According to Susan Solomon, the co-author of the study and the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT, ” If you are considering the nations like Tuvalu, which are exceptionally residing above the sea level, the question that is approaching is how much, we can emanate before they are damned. Even if we all stopped everything that is being emitted to the atmosphere, they will still go under and it is confirmed. “

Commenting on this matter, the lead authors of the research, Kirsten Zickfeld, from Simon Fraser University and Daniel Gilford, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science said; “In comparison to the chief greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, other gases like methane have short term life. But despite their short-lived, such gases have a long-term effect on the rising level of oceans. Though, after some centuries, methane-like gases will completely vanish from the atmosphere, but yet, they will keep simulating the sea level for years, centuries, and somehow for millennia.