Daijiworld Media Network

New Delhi, Nov 17: A NASA study reveals that Mangaluru may be at a higher risk of flooding if sea level rises due to melting of glaciers.

According to a report by Hindustan Times, a new tool developed by NASA scientists called Gradient Fingerprint Mapping (GFM) allows planners and the public to forecast how the melting in different regions of ice sheets will impact local sea levels at coastal cities.

The study finds that Mangaluru will see a higher local sea level (1.598 mm) than Mumbai (1.526 mm) in case of the same level of ice loss in glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland.

With GFM tool, people are able to see the impact of sea level rise on their own cities, says team member Dr Surendra Adhikar. The sea level rise caused by the melting of glaciers is not uniform across the globe since local factors play a role.

Hence, Mangaluru is at a higher risk than compared to cities like Mumbai and New York.

For Mangaluru the sensitivity is high to changes in ice thickness in almost all regions of the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheet. However, it is more sensitive to changes in the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet and the southern part of the Greenland ice sheet, reveals the study.

"This is the first time our method will enable planners and engineers to retrieve data about sea level in their area, and get updated numbers when new data about glacial melting becomes available," Surendra Adhikari, a co-author of the study, told Hindustan Times on Thursday.

The researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California applied the tool to 293 major port cities. In South Asia all cities studied such as Chittagong, Colombo and Karachi showed high sensitivity to melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.