This should help coastal residents sleep a little better, at least for a while longer. According to nasa.gov, “A new study by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the University of California, Irvine, shows that while ice sheets and glaciers continue to melt, changes in weather and climate over the past decade have caused Earth’s continents to soak up and store an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, temporarily slowing the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent.”

First, a quick primer. The hydrologic cycle occurs when precipitation that is deposited over land through the process of ocean evaporation gets recycled back into the ocean via tributaries. Minor disruptions in that process such as through “persistent regional changes in soil moisture or lake levels,” says NASA, can alter “the rate of sea level rise from what we would expect based on ice sheet and glacier melt rates.” But what scientists haven’t been able to determine until now was how much water runoff gets sucked up by the earth. Satellite measurements now provide a clue. According to lead author J.T. Reager, “We always assumed that people’s increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean. What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge — at least temporarily.”

Alarmists will inevitably say this discovery doesn’t change the overall threat posed by rising sea levels, which “97% of scientists” claim is linked to man-made global warming. We have another theory: Could it possibly be that something — say, our Creator — knew something we didn’t and developed a system to handle naturally rising sea levels? Imagine that.