Recent studies regarding sea level rise framing

Sea level rise

Sea level rise has been an issue in the media for a long time. Recently though, a study came out saying that scientists believe that by the end of the century, the ice melt from Antarctica alone could cause levels to rise by three meters (almost 50 feet). I chose to examine a couple of different articles regarding these new findings.

            The first source I examined was CNN.com. Their article was exactly as I expected. The top was a video where a man in a suit with white hair told us about how much trouble we are in and what major cities and ports on the eastern United States would be under water if things do not change. Moving on from there, the article was jammed with facts and numbers. Basically giving us all of the statistics from the research done with no fluff at all.

            The second source I looked at was the online publishing platform Medium.com. This is a site where anybody with an account (free) can write an article about anything they want to. I found an article there by Nina Burleigh, who traveled to Antarctica on assignment with Newsweek. Her article on Medium was drastically different from the article on CNN. Hers was much more of a cautionary story. She talks about her thoughts while she was flying over the lights of coastal cities at night, and her fears for what the future might hold. She had many of the same facts that the CNN article used, however she had much more fluff and opinion in hers. The only image in the article is of the George Washington Bridge and New York City, both of could be destroyed if sea levels rise as much as they are predicted to.

            The final article I looked at was one posted by National Geographic. Their article started with a picture of somebody wading through waist deep water in the middle of the street in a city. This article is somewhere in-between the other two. Although they do not necessarily display their feelings, they do fluff their story more than CNN did. The first part of the story is all of the facts that recently came to light with the study done. After that though, they dive into what we can do and whether or not it is too late for us to reverse the effects of what we have done to the earth over the last century. Overall, the tone of this piece is not necessarily as cold and serious as the CNN article, however it is not as much of a story or personal narrative as Burleigh’s work on Medium.com.