Coastal cities are vulnerable to increasing flood risks caused by the combination of sea-level rise (SLR) and storm tides (STs), due to their low-lying topography and densely distributed assets. Faced with this challenge, comprehensive and integrated flood risk information is vital and fundamental for the planning, implementation and optimization of coastal risk adaptation and management.

The response of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) to changes in temperature during the twentieth century remains contentious1, largely owing to difficulties in estimating the spatial and temporal distribution of ice mass changes before 1992, when Greenland-wide observations first became available2. The only previous estimates of change during the twentieth century are based on empirical modelling3, 4, 5 and energy balance modelling6, 7.

In 2002, Munk defined an important enigma of 20th century global mean sea-level (GMSL) rise that has yet to be resolved.