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Sea level is climbing — and speeding up
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mm / year · last 5 years (satellite)
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mm / yr² · rise speeding up over time
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Gt / year
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Gt / year
Ice sheets are pouring into the ocean
Each stack is scaled to annual mass loss — not a live ice meter, but the same IMBIE numbers as the KPI cards above.
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What does this mean for your coast?
Picking the nearest tracked port from your approximate location — or choose another city below.
Which cities face the highest water by 2050?
Illustrative local ranges (mm) ranked by high-end 2050 envelope. Cup height uses one shared scale (tallest = highest 2050 high-end) so you can compare cities — not each city’s own yardstick. Blue fill = mid projection; red cap = high-end; gray line = low-end.
Coastal cities — tide gauges & 2050 ranges
Tide gauges measure relative sea level (ocean + land motion). Satellite GMSL above is absolute open-ocean height.
| City | Trend | Anomaly | 2050 low | 2050 high | Land motion |
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Coastal stations map
IPCC projection scenarios
Global mean envelopes (metres) — not city-specific vertical land motion.
| Scenario | Low | Mid | High |
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What drives this
- Ocean heat →Warming water expands — thermal expansion is a top driver of rising seas.
- Polar ice →The same warming that shrinks sea ice melts the land ice that adds water.
What this drives
- Coastal flood risk →A higher baseline turns ordinary high tides and storms into damaging floods.
How we know this
- Global curve: NOAA STAR Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry — Topex, Jason, and Sentinel-6 stitched into one mean sea level series since 1993.
- Update cadence: We download NOAA’s public file on our daily build; new altimeter cycles usually arrive every week or two.
- Acceleration chart: Two straight-line trends — first half vs second half of the satellite record — so you can see the steeper recent slope without reading mm/yr².
- Coastal cities & map: Reference tide-gauge trends and coordinates — not a live PSMSL API on this page.
- Ice loss: IMBIE assessment means (Greenland and Antarctica); refreshed when we paste a new IMBIE release, not with every satellite download.
- Limitations: Tide gauges measure relative sea level (water + sinking land). Jakarta and Venice can outpace the open-ocean satellite curve.
- Primary data: NOAA STAR sea level · IMBIE · How this page is built