http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/trends-in-sea-level-1870-2006 comes from a group called "GRID-Arendal":http://www.grida.no/ in conjunction with the UN Environmental Programme's "Global Outlook for Ice and Snow":http://www.unep.org/geo/geo%5Fice/. The report is fascinating and long, but full of interesting things. The conclusion is obviously not good. With rising oceans, a lot of people living at or just above sea level might be in trouble soon. The impact of global warming is something we've barely scratched the surface on feeling, and I fear that it will get a lot worse before it gets better. To try to get my head around this concept of rising sea levels and the real impact it can have, I've found some resources more helpful than others, and I'll share those with you now. This first resource you may have seen before but it's worth looking at again. It's a "Google Earth plug-in":http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/847094 that simulates the rising sea levels over the next 100 years. Some places do alright but there are a lot of cities (New York, London, Amsterdam, etc) and even countries (Bangladesh for example) that lie low enough to be almost completely flooded. Secondly, this is a good "illustration":http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/ice-sheets-schematic-illustration-for-greenland-and-antarctica of how the ice shelves "calve" icebergs which dissolve away into the sea. Of course if you have seen this before you probably saw it in Al Gore's _Inconvenient Truth_, and you probably don't need any convincing that this is real and bad. Really bad. Previously featured on Duenos: * "Permafrost no longer":http://duenos.net/article/286/Permafrostnolonger: An Alaskan village struggles with a deep thaw that leaves the land unable to support buildings and has cut it off completely from the mainland. * "Google Earth maps the Darfur genocide":http://duenos.net/article/140/GoogleEarthhighlightsCrisisinDarfur