A new study that was recently published in the journal Nature shows that scientists studying sea-level rise have been using methods that underestimate how high the water already is. One result is that hundreds of millions more people worldwide are already living dangerously close to the rising ocean than Western scientists had previously estimated, according to the New York Times. This may be bad news for the coastal regions of the Southeast, because it means that our coasts are in more danger from storm surge, tidal flooding and changes in estuaries than we previously thought. The problem comes from the way the irregular shape of the earth (due to spinning and gravity) is brought into the calculations and apparently has been misused by over 300 studies of sea level in the past. If you want to know more about the discrepancy and how it came to be, you can read more at the New York Times.
