Aug 20 2015

From The Space Library

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Revision as of 05:13, 21 August 2015

Release M15-127 NASA Holds Media Opportunities to Discuss Rising Sea Levels

In a series of media opportunities Wednesday, Aug. 26 through Friday, Aug. 28, NASA experts will present an up-to-date global outlook on current conditions and future projections of sea level rise.

From fieldwork on the Greenland ice sheet this summer, to new satellite views of sea level changes around the world, NASA’s “Rising Seas” events will provide the latest assessment of scientific understanding of this global environmental issue.

NASA will host a media teleconference at 12:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Aug. 26 to discuss recent insights on sea level rise and the continuing challenge of predicting how fast and how much sea level will rise. The panelists for this briefing are:

• Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division at the agency’s headquarters in Washington
• Steve Nerem, lead for NASA’s Sea Level Change Team at the University of Colorado in Boulder
• Josh Willis, oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California
• Eric Rignot, glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine and JPL

On Thursday, Aug. 27 NASA scientists will be available for live satellite television interviews about the latest sea level research and new visualizations of global sea level changes and ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica. Interviews are available from 5:45 to 11:30 a.m. and 1 to 5 p.m. For more information, contact Michelle Handleman at michelle.z.handleman@nasa.gov by Wednesday.

At 1 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 28, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will host a live TV program about agency research into how and why the massive Greenland ice sheet is changing. The event features scientists actively conducting field work in Greenland, along with extensive video footage of their work performed over this summer. Panelists include:

• Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist with NASA’s Earth Science Division
• Laurence Smith, chair of the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Geography
• Mike Bevis, professor of geodynamics at Ohio State University in Columbus
• Sophie Nowicki, physical scientist at Goddard
• Josh Willis, JPL

As Earth’s oceans continue to warm, and its ice sheets continue to show signs of accelerated change, NASA is pursuing answers to how quickly seas could rise in the future. Scientists worldwide use NASA data to tackle some of the toughest questions about how our planet is changing. Using the vantage point of space, NASA is pioneering research into how changes in the ocean, ice sheets, glaciers and Earth’s surface combine to produce global changes in sea level.