Most of Bermuda could be underwater in another 50 to 100 years, one natural disaster expert has warned.

“That would be if the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets really started breaking up,” seismologist Lucy Jones said at the ILS Bermuda Convergence 2023 conference.

Seismologists are now recording ice quakes that indicate the ice sheets are starting to crack up.

The founder and chief scientist at the California-based Dr Lucy Jones Centre for Science and Society said: “You are not very high above sea level.”

Dr Jones is widely recognised as a leading voice on seismology and disaster preparedness and spent 33 years at the United States Geological Survey. She is the author of The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them).

In 2019, seismologists discovered that the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica was experiencing thousands of small quakes in slushier areas and, mysteriously, at night. They theorise that this is an indication of the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Someone in the audience at the Hamilton Princess jokingly asked how many minutes did we have left.

“I think my grandchildren will live to see it, if we do nothing,” Dr Jones said. She estimated 50 to 100 years.

Her estimate is somewhat controversial.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre website, the melting of the polar ice sheets will not happen for the “foreseeable future”, although foreseeable future is undefined.

In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reported that the melt of only a tiny fraction of an ice sheet exacerbates high-tide flooding, and rapid change on an ice sheet could spell disaster.

Speaking about natural disasters generally, Dr Jones said: “We are creating a world where we have a lot more people concentrated in much smaller spaces and therefore the capacity for much greater disasters because of that.”

However, she said that many scientists were optimistic that things could be changed for the better.

“There are a lot of things we could be doing,” Dr Jones said.

For example, she said replacing fossil-fuelled cars, stoves and heating systems, with electric versions, would go a long way to saving the planet.

“If everyone in the United States made a commitment to replace their next appliance with an electric one, we would meet our emission reduction goals,” she said.

Dr Jones said climate experts also had to change the delivery of the message, helping people to see the tangible benefits of change.

She said when people hear that they have to give something up, they shut down.

“People hate losing, much more than they love winning,” she said.

She said a lot of people her age, 68, asked why they should worry about climate change since they would not live to see it, but climate change was already here.

“With the increase in disasters, you're seeing the beginning of the acceleration,” she said.