Check out this recently announced study “Study: Rising Seas Slowed by Increasing Water on Land.”
It turns out that the land holds much more water than scientists had assumed.
And now they’ve achieved the empirical evidence that puts a number on it.
It’s another example of a few things, for me firstly, that original understanding is always more simplistic and blind-spot saturated than most are willing to admit. Secondly, that scientists are a self skeptical crowd. They are keenly aware of their blind-spots and gaps. They aren’t on a egotistical self-aggrandizing trip wedded to always being right. It’s the understanding that’s paramount! Another thing, it show that scientists are dictated by the evidence and if the evidence is lacking, they keep refining their efforts until they do get the evidence that helps them explain mysteries and attain a new plateau of understanding.
Behold, another one of those folds within folds of Earth’s harmonic complexity
FEBRUARY 11, 2016 Study: Rising Seas Slowed by Increasing Water on Land http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=5136 Each year, a large amount of water evaporates from the ocean, falls over land as rain or snow, and returns to the ocean through runoff and river flows. This is known as the global hydrologic, or water, cycle. Scientists have long known small changes in the hydrologic cycle -- by persistent regional changes in soil moisture or lake levels, for instance -- could change the rate of sea level rise from what we would expect based on ice sheet and glacier melt rates. However, they did not know how large the land storage effect would be because there were no instruments that could accurately measure global changes in liquid water on land. "We always assumed that people's increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean," said lead author J.T. Reager of JPL, who began work on the study as a graduate student at UC Irvine. "What we didn't realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge -- at least temporarily. "These new data are vital for understanding decadal variations in sea level change," Reager added. "The information will be a critical complement to future long-term projections of sea level rise, which depend on melting ice and warming oceans."