Mar 05, 2014 02:58 PM EST By Jaleesa Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Famous global landmarks could be lost to rising sea-levels as a result of climate change, according to a recent study, reported by Agence France Presse.

New research published in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters states that some of the world's most recognizable and important landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Tower of London and the Sydney Opera House, could be lost to rising sea-levels if current global warming trends are maintained over the next two millennia.

This is according to a new study that has calculated the temperature increases at which the 720 sites currently on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites would be impacted by subsequent sea-level rises.

"Sea-levels are responding to global warming slowly but steadily because the key processes involved -ocean heat uptake and melting continental ice - go on for a long while after the warming of the atmosphere has stopped," Ben Marzeion from the University of Innsbruck said in a statement.

Researchers calculated the temperature increases at which 720 sites currently on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites would be impacted by subsequent sea-level rises. They found that 136 sites would be impacted if the current global warming trend continues and temperatures rise to 3°C above pre-industrial levels in the next 2000 years - a likely and not particularly extreme scenario, researchers said.

"After 2000 years, the oceans would have reached a new equilibrium state and we can compute the ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica from physical models," co-author Anders Levermann, professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a statement.

They predict that seven percent of the current global population would be living on land that would be below sea level and that the distribution of the affected population was uneven -- more than 60 percent of the affected population would be in China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia.

"We've assumed that a heritage site is impacted when at least part of it is below local mean sea-level; however, tides and storm surges may dictate whether or not the site should be protected before sea-levels reach this point," Marzeion said.

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