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CDN by the sea: Kigiliah, Russia

08 Jun 2022 | Science Notes

We’re not sure if the sanctions on Russia mean we’re not supposed to use any data from them. But Kigiliah is pretty far east into Siberia. In fact it’s on a small island in the Laptev Sea (misleadingly named Большой Ляховский or “Great Lyakhovsky” Island) that not even Google can find which has no population (although the river Lena from which “Lenin” took his nomme de guerre empties into the Laptev nearby). So it probably didn’t have much to do with the decision to start a war with the Ukraine. But if you’re rooting for the seas around it to rise and from there inundate Moscow in retribution for its thuggish foreign policy, we have to say Izvinite, nyet happening anytime soon.

At 2.56 mm per year it will take over 390 years to rise one meter, hardly enough to send the population fleeing if it had one. Though when you see the longer data set, even that number may be an underestimate. [Read more.]

Here are the records back to the 1950s:

There was really no increase at all until 2015-16 which was an El Niño year and might have distorted the record. It looks like the sea level is dropping back to its historical average. The 2020 level is lower than the level in 1954. A few more years and we’ll see. And in the meantime we’ll keep searching the world for the sea level crisis we keep hearing about.

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