Future
Climate change is going to have a big impact on coastal areas all over the world, also on our World Heritage Site. Climate change does not directly threat the land uplift phenomenon, but we will not see the effects of the land uplift as the sea level rises. As long as the land rises faster than the sea level, new land will continue to emerge, although not as much as nowadays. But if the sea level rises faster than the land uplift, we cannot see any new land. Instead it will seem as if the land is sinking.
Scientist believe that the World Heritage area will continue to rise by 90 centimetres per century for a few hundred years. After that the pace will slow down because the Earth’s crust is approaching its original position which it had before the Ice Age. By contrast, global sea levels have already risen at an average pace of 3,6 millimetres per year during 2005-2015. This latest prediction is stated in the report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, published in September 2019.
According to the report, the amount of new land we see, or the apparent land uplift, is only 6-7 millimetres per year in our World Heritage Site. The report also predicts that global sea level will rise faster in the future. By the end of this century, sea levels may have risen by 30-60 centimetres if the best-case scenario of the report happens. In the report’s worst-case scenario, sea levels can rise as much as 110 centimetres before the year 2100. Because of the rapidly rising sea levels, it is unlikely that an isthmus or a land bridge is created between Sweden and Finland before the next Ice Age.
