Tech
NASA dropped a new report. Its a wake-up call.
Consequences, they say, collect in low places.
A new NASA analysis, using data collected from different specialized satellites, reports that sea levels rose more than expected in 2024. But as any earth scientist will emphasize, the data in any particular year isn't nearly as important as the long-term trend. And the agency's analysis shows that global sea levels have gone up over 10 centimeters, or about four inches, since 1993 when satellites started measuring ocean height, and this rate is increasing. (Overall, sea levels have risen some eight to nine inches since 1880.)
“Every year is a little bit different, but what’s clear is that the ocean continues to rise, and the rate of rise is getting faster and faster," Josh Willis, who researches sea level rise at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
After reporting on sea level rise — which stokes increased flooding and storm damage while threatening coastal infrastructure from sewage plants to water supplies — over the past decade, the most common responses I receive on the topic (beyond the unprintable) are either essentially "that's barely any sea level rise" or "stop sensationalizing sea level rise." It's true that four inches of sea level rise over the last few decades may not be concerning or noticeable to some people. And just four inches itself, occurring in a temporal vacuum, doesn't spell a serious problem. The problem, however, is it's not stopping at four inches.
In a previous report authored by top researchers at a diversity of U.S. agencies — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, the Department of Defense, and beyond — scientists project sea levels will rise by some 10 inches to a foot along the U.S. coast over just the next three decades. And again, it won't stop there, either. The U.S. could see several feet of sea level rise by the century's end. (Different longer-range sea level rise scenarios are shown later in this story.)
The new NASA graphic below shows the picture captured by satellites since 1993. Importantly, the rate of sea level rise increase has doubled over this period. Satellites, like the Sentinel-6/Michael Freilich spacecraft, use radar altimeters to observe sea level rise by beaming radio waves from space to the surface, which reflect off the ocean and return to the satellite.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
There are two main contributors to sea level rise. The largest contributor, at some two-thirds, is melting ice. Globally, nearly all mountain glaciers are shrinking, and much glacial water ultimately enters the ocean. What's more, the colossal ice stores on Greenland and Antarctica are melting enormous amounts of water into the sea. (The Greenland Ice Sheet, about three times the size of Texas, lost some 200 gigatons annually between 2003 and 2019. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tonnes.) The second is thermal expansion: As the seas absorb more heat, they expand.
In 2024, however, thermal expansion played a larger role, which is little surprise as 2024 was Earth's hottest year on record (the seas absorb over 90 percent of the heat humans trap on Earth). This boosted sea level rise a bit above current annual expectations, to nearly a quarter inch. (Rising surface temperatures are part of another clear trend: The last 10 consecutive years have been the warmest 10 on record, NASA says.)
In the coming years, however, Earth's melting ice sheets will play an outsized role in sea level rise. "The ice sheets are just getting warmed up," NASA's Willis previously told Mashable.
"The ice sheets are just getting warmed up."
There is uncertainty about how much sea levels will rise by the century's end because humanity has never seen such human-caused melting before. How much water, for example, will Antarctica's destabilized, Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier dump into the oceans in the coming years? "Thwaites is the one spot in Antarctica that has the potential to dump an enormous amount of water into the ocean over the next decades," Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a professor of glaciology at Penn State University who researches Thwaites, told Mashable in 2021.
Four inches since 1993 is really just the beginning as Earth continues to warm.
The following five long-term (2050-2150) sea level rise scenarios, compiled by U.S. agencies in the comprehensive report cited above, cover a wide range of possibilities. The "low" scenario — involving an extremely ambitious climate target — requires global nations to stabilize Earth's warming at around 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above 19th-century temperature levels by mid-century. Compared to sea levels in 2000, the "Intermediate" scenario for the U.S. below, which projects 1.3 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and several feet by 2100, is a world warmed by around 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) by mid-century.
Credit: NOAA 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report
Ultimately, the amount of sea level rise experienced by our descendants is up to the choices made by the most unpredictable part of the climate equation — us.
TL;DR: Access dozens of top AI tools in one platform — 1min.AI bundles content, chat, design, audio, video, PDF, and more under a single lifetime license for just $79.97.
Opens in a new window
One of the bigger annoyances of the digital age is the subscription model. Juggling a half-dozen AI tools, each with its own login credentials, pricing tiers, and learning curve, is exhausting. That’s why 1min.AI can be a helpful alternative to the usual chaos.
It’s like your favorite productivity cheat code — an all-in-one platform that brings together top-tier AI features for writing, design, video, audio, and more under a single dashboard. And you can get a lifetime subscription to the Advanced Business Plan for just $79.97 (down from the MSRP of $540) — with no recurring fees, ever.
Need blog posts written in your brand voice? Check. Want to generate YouTube thumbnails, edit PDFs with AI, or even clean up audio? Covered. From chatting with advanced models like GPT-4o and Claude 3 to turning PDFs into summaries, translating audio, or batch-generating marketing copy, 1min.AI does it fast — like, one-minute fast. That’s the whole point.
Whether you’re a solo creator or running a small team, 1min.AI simplifies your stack. You’ll have access to multiple flagship models like GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama, plus unlimited brand voice slots, unlimited prompt storage, and 4,000,000 credits/month to spend on whatever you want to make.
If you’re tired of managing a spreadsheet of AI tools (we’ve been there), this is your chance to condense it all into one slick, ever-evolving platform — without the subscription guilt of drain.
Get lifetime access to the 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan for just $79.97 while you can and streamline your digital tools forever.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
It seems OpenAI has been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Anthropic has reportedly cut off OpenAI’s access to Anthropic’s APIs over what Anthropic is calling a terms of service breach.
As reported by Wired, multiple sources claim that OpenAI has been cut off from Anthropic’s APIs. Allegedly, OpenAI was using Anthropic’s Claude Code to assist in creating and testing OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which is due to release in August.
According to these sources, OpenAI was plugging into Claude’s internal tools instead of using the chat interface. From there, they used the API to run tests against GPT-5 to check things like coding and creative writing against Claude to compare performance. OpenAI allegedly also tested safety prompts related to things like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation. This would give OpenAI data that it could then use to fine-tune GPT-5 to make it more competitive against Claude.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, this violates Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, which ban companies from using Anthropic’s tools to build competitor AI products.
“Customer may not and must not attempt to access the Services to build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or resell the Services except as expressly approved by Anthropic,” the terms read.
OpenAI responded by saying that what the company was doing was an industry standard, as all the AI companies test their models against the competing models. The company then went on to say that it respected Anthropic’s decision but expressed disappointment in having its API access shut off, especially considering that Anthropic’s access to OpenAI’s API remains open.
A spokesperson told Wired that OpenAI’s access would be reinstated for “benchmarking and safety evaluations.”
It’s not the first time this year that Anthropic has cut off API access. In June, the company cut off Windsurf’s API access after rumors that it was being sold to OpenAI. That deal ultimately fell through, but Anthropic’s cofounder, Jared Kaplan, told TechCrunch at the time that “it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”
Anthropic has also tweaked its rate limits for Claude, which will take effect in late August, with one of the reasons being that a small number of users are violating the company’s policy by sharing and reselling accounts.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
It’s the end of another quarter, which means it’s time for yet another earnings call with concerning ideas for generating more revenue. This time around, it's Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told shareholders on Thursday that there’s “significant financial opportunity” in delivering ads through Alexa+, the company’s new AI-powered voice assistant.
“I think over time, there will be opportunities, you know, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations to have advertising play a role — to help people find discovery and also as a lever to drive revenue,” Jassy said, per the investor call transcript.
Since launching earlier this year, Alexa+ has reportedly reached millions of users. Unlike the original Alexa, which mostly turns off lights and sets timers, Alexa+ is designed to be more conversational, context-aware, and AI-driven. It can help you plan your date night, entertain your kids, and even dabble in basic image and video generation — all under the banner of your $14.99/month Prime subscription.
But so far, Amazon Alexa has been an ad-free experience. It's also more than 10 years old, and it doesn't make money; thus, it's been deemed a "colossal failure" by those within the company.
Of course, Amazon isn’t alone in trying to figure out how to make AI pay for itself. Both Google and OpenAI have explored ad integration in their AI products as a way to generate revenue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in particular, has made a notable pivot: once firmly against advertising in his chatbot, he’s since reversed course, possibly opening the door for ads in future versions of ChatGPT.
Whatever the motivation, injecting ads into Alexa+ would mark a major shift in both user experience and Amazon’s strategy, especially given the assistant’s long history of being expensive to maintain and hard to monetize. Ad-supported Alexa+ could be Amazon’s attempt to finally turn its once-money-burning smart assistant into a revenue machine, without hiking the subscription fee (at least for now).
Alexa+ is still new, and what an ad-supported experience would actually look like remains unclear. According to Jassy, the idea is to frame ads as helpful, something to assist customers in discovering products they might be interested in buying.
The Top 10 Traits That Make CEOs Leaders
Six Figures, Seven Figures? What You Need to Earn to Join the 1%
Stop your AI subscriptions and get an all-in-one tool for life
New Kid and Family Movies in 2025: Calendar of Release Dates (Updating)
The best sexting apps in 2025
Every potential TikTok buyer we know about
-
Entertainment5 months agoNew Kid and Family Movies in 2025: Calendar of Release Dates (Updating)
-
Tech5 months ago
The best sexting apps in 2025
-
Tech5 months agoEvery potential TikTok buyer we know about
-
Tech5 months ago
iOS 18.4 developer beta released — heres what you can expect
-
Politics5 months agoDOGE-ing toward the best Department of Defense ever
-
Tech6 months agoAre You an RSSMasher?
-
Politics5 months agoToxic RINO Susan Collins Is a “NO” on Kash Patel, Trashes Him Ahead of Confirmation Vote
-
Politics5 months agoAfter Targeting Chuck Schumer, Acting DC US Attorney Ed Martin Expands ‘Operation Whirlwind’ to Investigate Democrat Rep. Robert Garcia for Calling for “Actual Weapons” Against Elon Musk