Statue of Liberty photos don’t disprove sea level rise

CLAIM: Photos of the Statue of Liberty from 1898 and 2017 show that sea levels have not risen significantly.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Sea level rise in the New York City area as well as globally has been documented by scientific bodies. The comparison of the two photos is misleading because it doesn’t account for tidal fluctuations, experts say.

THE FACTS: Posts falsely suggesting that side-by-side photos of Liberty Island show that sea level rise is a myth have spread across social media platforms including Twitter and TikTok in recent days.

The posts feature a black and white photo of the Statue of Liberty dated 1898, as well as a color photo of the statue from a slightly different angle supposedly dated 2017. The water levels are similar in both photos.

“This is what catastrophic sea level rise actually looks like,” one Twitter user wrote on March 14 in a tweet that was shared over 17,000 times. Similarly, an Instagram user shared an image of the tweet on Wednesday and wrote in reference to the climate change activist Greta Thunberg, “@gretathunberg what do you think about this?”

The posts are misleading, experts say. Sea level rise has been well documented in the New York City area and globally.

The global average sea level has risen 8 to 9 inches, or 203-228 millimeters, since 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while NASA estimates that the average sea level has risen roughly 3.8 inches, about 96.7 millimeters, since 1993. And the sea level at The Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan, around 1.7 miles from Liberty Island, has risen at a rate of almost a foot, or 304.8 millimeters, per 100 years, according to NOAA.

“The rise of sea level globally of 3.3 mm/yr and locally in New York of 4.5 mm/yr is a fact documented by satellite and tide gauge data,” Kenneth G. Miller, distinguished professor and graduate program director at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers, wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

The black and white photo in the social media posts is dated 1898, according to Getty Images. A reverse image search shows that the color image supposedly dated 2017 has been online since at least 2013.

But the two photos don’t provide an accurate representation of how sea levels have changed over time because tidal cycles affect water levels, experts say.

“Tidal variability is like 5 feet or so in this area,” said Jacqueline Austermann, an assistant professor at Columbia University who studies sea level change. “Depending on what time of the day this picture was taken, you could have tens of centimeters difference just because of tidal variability.”

Comparing such photos is “not really a useful comparison” to demonstrate sea level change, she added.

“What these pictures don’t show is the tide height when these pictures were taken,” Jennie Lyons, a spokesperson for NOAA, wrote in an email to the AP. “Mean sea level, which is based upon long term averages not aliased by tide or weather, is the best way to measure long term changes.”

Lyons noted that the long-term rate of relative sea level rise in the New York City region has been roughly 3 millimeters per year, or one foot per 100 years. This rate is accelerating, with about a half-foot of rise occurring between 1970 and 2020, and the region is expected to experience as much as another foot of sea level rise in the next 30 years, she wrote.

Similar misleading photo comparisons have previously circulated online, such as photos of Fort Denison in Australia’s Sydney Harbor.

Sea levels have risen due to warming oceans and melting ice over land caused by climate change.

The U.S. coastline will see sea levels rise in the next 30 years by as much as they did in the entire 20th century, with major Eastern cities hit regularly with costly floods even on sunny days, according to a 2022 report by NOAA and six other federal agencies. One study asserted that sea level rise caused by climate change added $8 billion in damage during 2012’s Superstorm Sandy that struck New York and surrounding areas.

“The rise of sea-level in the past century is insidious because it is slow, but the total effects add up,” Miller wrote.

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This story has been updated to clarify NOAA’s estimate of sea level rise at The Battery.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.