A new NASA sea level simulator lets you bury Alaska’s Columbia glacier in snow, and, year by year, watch how it responds. Or you can melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and trace rising seas as they inundate the Florida coast. Computer models are critical tools for understanding the future of a changing planet, including melting ice, rising seas and shifting precipitation patterns. But typically, these mathematical representations -- long chains of computer code giving rise to images of dynamic change -- are accessible mainly to scientists.
The new simulator, however, allows anyone with a computer to perform idealized experiments with sea level and learn about its complexities. Developed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the interactive platform, called the Virtual Earth System Laboratory (VESL), provides the public with a taste of how NASA models important Earth processes. Theplatform will also prove useful to scientists as a convenient way to create visual representations of data.
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