NASA Analysis Shows Irreversible Sea Level Rise for Pacific Islands

Climate change is rapidly reshaping a region of the world that’s home to millions of people.

In the next 30 years, Pacific Island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Fiji will experience at least 8 inches (15 centimeters) of sea level rise, according to an analysis by NASA’s sea level change science team. This amount of rise will occur regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions change in the coming years.

The sea level change team undertook the analysis of this region at the request of several Pacific Island nations, including Tuvalu and Kiribati, and in close coordination with the U.S. Department of State.

In addition to the overall analysis, the agency’s sea level team produced high-resolution maps showing which areas of different Pacific Island nations will be vulnerable to high-tide flooding — otherwise known as nuisance flooding or sunny day flooding — by the 2050s. Released on Sept. 23, the maps outline flooding potential in a range of emissions scenarios, from best-case to business-as-usual to worst-case.

“Sea level will continue to rise for centuries, causing more frequent flooding,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, who directs ocean physics programs for NASA’s Earth Science Division. “NASA’s new flood tool tells you what the potential increase in flooding frequency and severity look like in the next decades for the coastal communities of the Pacific Island nations.”

Team members, led by researchers at the University of Hawaii and in collaboration with scientists at the University of Colorado and Virginia Tech, started with flood maps of Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, Nauru, and Niue. They plan to build high-resolution maps for other Pacific Island nations in the near future. The maps can assist Pacific Island nations in deciding where to focus mitigation efforts.

“Science and data can help the community of Tuvalu in relaying accurate sea level rise projections,” said Grace Malie, a youth leader from Tuvalu who is involved with the Rising Nations Initiative, a United Nations-supported program led by Pacific Island nations to help preserve their statehood and protect the rights and heritage of populations affected by climate change. “This will also help with early warning systems, which is something that our country is focusing on at the moment.”

Future Flooding

The analysis by the sea level change team also found that the number of high-tide flooding days in an average year will increase by an order of magnitude for nearly all Pacific Island nations by the 2050s. Portions of the NASA team’s analysis were included in a sea level rise report published by the United Nations in August 2024.  

Areas of Tuvalu that currently see less than five high-tide flood days a year could average 25 flood days annually by the 2050s. Regions of Kiribati that see fewer than five flood days a year today will experience an average of 65 flood days annually by the 2050s.

“I am living the reality of climate change,” said Malie. “Everyone (in Tuvalu) lives by the coast or along the coastline, so everyone gets heavily affected by this.” 

Flooding on island nations can come from the ocean inundating land during storms or during exceptionally high tides, called king tides. But it can also result when saltwater intrudes into underground areas and pushes the water table to the surface. “There are points on the island where we will see seawater bubbling from beneath the surface and heavily flooding the area,” Malie added.

Matter of Location

Sea level rise doesn’t occur uniformly around the world. A combination of global and local conditions, such as the topography of a coastline and how glacial meltwater is distributed in the ocean, affects the amount of rise a particular region will experience.

“We’re always focused on the differences in sea level rise from one region to another, but in the Pacific, the numbers are surprisingly consistent,” said Ben Hamlington, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the agency’s sea level change science team lead.

The impacts of 8 inches (15 centimeters) of sea level rise will vary from country to country. For instance, some nations could experience nuisance flooding several times a year at their airport, while others might face frequent neighborhood flooding equivalent to being inundated for nearly half the year.

Researchers would like to combine satellite data on ocean levels with ground-based measurements of sea levels at specific points, as well as with better land elevation information. “But there’s a real lack of on-the-ground data in these countries,” said Hamlington. The combination of space-based and ground-based measurements can yield more precise sea level rise projections and improved understanding of the impacts to countries in the Pacific.  

“The future of the young people of Tuvalu is already at stake,” said Malie. “Climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is about justice, survival for nations like Tuvalu, and global responsibility.”

To explore the high-tide flooding maps for Pacific Island nations, go to:

https://sealevel.nasa.gov

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov

2024-128

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­­Robotic Moving ‘Crew’ Preps for Work on Moon 

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­­Robotic Moving ‘Crew’ Preps for Work on Moon 

As NASA moves forward with efforts to establish a long-term presence on the Moon as part of the Artemis campaign, safely moving cargo from landers to the lunar surface is a crucial capability.  

Whether the cargo, also known as payloads, are small scientific experiments or large technology to build infrastructure, there won’t be a crew on the Moon to do all the work, which is where robots and new software come in. 

A team at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, spent the last couple of years infusing existing robotic hardware with a software system that makes the robot operate autonomously. Earlier this month, that team, led by researcher Dr. Julia Cline of NASA Langley’s Research Directorate, ran demonstrations of their system called LANDO (Lightweight Surface Manipulation System AutoNomy capabilities Development for surface Operations and construction). 

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After locating the metal box and computing a safe path to move it, the arm began a slow, deliberate movement toward its target, coming in at a precise angle that allowed the hook to select a capture point on the payload. Once engaged, the arm slowly lifted the payload from the pedestal, moved right, and gently lowered the payload to the simulated lunar surface. With the payload safely on the surface, the system carefully disengaged the hook from the capture point and returned to its home position. The entire process took a few minutes. Shortly after the first demo was complete, the team did it again, but with a small model rover.  

“What we demonstrated was the repeatability of the system,moving multiple payloads to show that we’re consistently and safely able to get them from point A to point B,” said Cline. “We also demonstrated the Lightweight Surface Manipulation System hardware – the ability to control the system through space and plan a path around obstacles.” 

The system’s successful performance during the September demonstration marks the end of this project, but the first step in developing a larger system to go to the Moon. 

Now that the team has determined how the system should function, Cline believes the next natural step would be to develop and test an engineering design unit on one of the landers going to the Moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. The team is actively looking for industry partners who want to commercialize the capability. 

Through CLPS, NASA is working with commercial companies to deliver science and technology demonstrations to the Moon.  

The work behind LANDO could be directly infused into much larger versions of a lightweight surface manipulation system.

“The overall control system we’ve developed would apply to larger versions of the technology,” said Cline. “When you think about the payloads we’ll have to offload for on the Moon, like habitats and surface power systems, this is the kind of general-purpose tool that could be used for those tasks.” 

The LANDO system was funded through the Early Career Initiative in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). Through STMD, NASA supports and develops transformative space technologies to enable future missions. As NASA embarks on its next era of exploration with the Artemis campaign, STMD is helping advance technologies, developing new systems, and testing capabilities at the Moon that will be critical for crewed missions to Mars. 

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In Odd Galaxy, NASA’s Webb Finds Potential Missing Link to First Stars

Looking deep into the early universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the big bang, galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (9422) may be a missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the universe’s first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.

Image A: Galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (NIRCam Image)

“My first thought in looking at the galaxy’s spectrum was, ‘that’s weird,’ which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began,” said lead researcher Alex Cameron of the University of Oxford.

Cameron reached out to colleague Harley Katz, a theorist, to discuss the strange data. Working together, their team found that computer models of cosmic gas clouds heated by very hot, massive stars, to an extent that the gas shone brighter than the stars, was nearly a perfect match to Webb’s observations.

“It looks like these stars must be much hotter and more massive than what we see in the local universe, which makes sense because the early universe was a very different environment,” said Katz, of Oxford and the University of Chicago.

In the local universe, typical hot, massive stars have a temperature ranging between 70,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit (40,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius). According to the team, galaxy 9422 has stars hotter than 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit (80,000 degrees Celsius).

The research team suspects that the galaxy is in the midst of a brief phase of intense star formation inside a cloud of dense gas that is producing a large number of massive, hot stars. The gas cloud is being hit with so many photons of light from the stars that it is shining extremely brightly.

Image B: Galaxy GS-NDG-9422 Spectrum (NIRSpec)

In addition to its novelty, nebular gas outshining stars is intriguing because it is something predicted in the environments of the universe’s first generation of stars, which astronomers classify as Population III stars.

“We know that this galaxy does not have Population III stars, because the Webb data shows too much chemical complexity. However, its stars are different than what we are familiar with – the exotic stars in this galaxy could be a guide for understanding how galaxies transitioned from primordial stars to the types of galaxies we already know,” said Katz.

At this point, galaxy 9422 is one example of this phase of galaxy development, so there are still many questions to be answered. Are these conditions common in galaxies at this time period, or a rare occurrence? What more can they tell us about even earlier phases of galaxy evolution? Cameron, Katz, and their research colleagues are actively identifying more galaxies to add to this population to better understand what was happening in the universe within the first billion years after the big bang.

“It’s a very exciting time, to be able to use the Webb telescope to explore this time in the universe that was once inaccessible,” Cameron said. “We are just at the beginning of new discoveries and understanding.”

The research paper is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

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View/Download the research results from the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Media Contacts

Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu, Leah Ramsay – lramsay@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

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