“It’s Getting Faster and Faster:” How Unexpected Sea Level Rise Effects Where You Surf

Year after year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tracks global sea levels with an ever-increasing and -improving series of satellites. The agency has settled on a somewhat predictable average of 0.17 inches per year, but 2024 saw that number increase more than 35% to 0.23 inches, according to a recent press release. It may not sound like much, but “much” is relative when we are talking about year-over-year data on this big blue marble we all inhabit. That 0.23-inch increase is, as a matter of fact, the highest sea level NASA has recorded in three decades.

“The rise we saw in 2024 was higher than expected,” Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, California, said somewhat understatedly in a NASA press release last week. “Every year is a little bit different,” he added—and it’s worth noting that NASA has only been recording ocean height by satellite since 1993—”but what’s clear is that the ocean continues to rise, and the rate of rise is getting faster and faster.”

The release goes on to say that “in recent years, about two-thirds of sea level rise was from the addition of water from land into the ocean by melting ice sheets and glaciers,” with most of the rest coming from thermal expansion of seawater—warmer water has greater volume than colder water (This is partly why commercial ships have what’s called a Plimsoll line, which delineates its draft in various salinities and temperatures.)

“With 2024 as the warmest year on record, Earth’s expanding oceans are following suit, reaching their highest levels in three decades,” NASA’s head of physical oceanography programs and the Integrated Earth System Observatory at HQ in Washington, D.C.

Of course, the volume of water isn’t so much why we here at Surfer draw concern from these numbers. Not being oceanographers ourselves, per se, we gave a shout to New South Wales, Australia-based Swellnet Surf Forecaster Craig Brokensha what this might mean for surf breaks and forecasts going forward, and how soon we might see changes at this rate.

“From a daily forecasting perspective, rising sea levels in the next few years won't really come into consideration,” Brokensha offered, somewhat consolingly. “This is mainly because of the other variables at play, which have a larger effect on short term sea levels—moon phases, coastal trapped waves, the inverse barometer effect, things like that.” The inverse barometer effect is the ocean’s static response to changes in atmospheric pressure, leading sea level to rise when pressure drops, and lower when pressure increases.

“However,” Brokensha says of looking forward, “when assessing time scales from decades to centuries, you then have a greater impact at spots that are very tidally affected. Coral reef growth can keep up with gradual sea level rises but static reefs and rocky points will experience a slow evolution in the shape of the breaking waves. Beaches of course are very dynamic environments and the dense coastal/urban interface will experience increasing challenges as erosion events become more commonplace.”

It may go without saying, but this is all going to vary greatly from one type of break to the next. A tropical reef with minimal tide swings that stops working at the low end might, in as little as a decade or three, start receiving swell and serving up perfection throughout the entire tide cycle.

In the long range, but perhaps not quite as long as we all had hoped and thought, our beloved peaks could well go the way of Atlantis, and that’s to say nothing of our other haunts—and our homes. Surf ‘em while you got ‘em.