How fast will our coastlines be swallowed up by rising sea levels? This week, an ice-age glacier lent support to the controversial view that sea levels could rise by 1 metre per century - and so drown land now occupied by 145 million people by 2100.rnThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year forecast a minimum rise of 18 to 59 centimetres by 2100. And they admitted in the small print that the range did not include water from the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. Together, they contain enough water to raise sea levels by an astonishing 70 metres though nobody knows how fast it will be released.rnTo get a better idea, Anders Carlson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues looked at what had happened at the end of the last ice age, when the last fragments of the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of north-eastern Canada.
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