The Iselin Marine Facility overlooks Vineyard Sound, Woods Hole Passage, and Great Harbor in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Constructed in 1969, it has supported more than a half century of seagoing operations at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Since construction, relative sea level in Woods Hole has risen by 0.19 m, as measured by a tide gauge on the Iselin Dock. As the current facility reaches the end of its design life, and the Institution plans for a new marine research complex enabling future ocean science, engineering, and education, one question looms largest: how high should the new dock structure and bulkhead be elevated to account for future sea-level rise? Similar questions face countless communities, stakeholders, and policy makers around the world as they grapple with the potential impacts of future sea-level rise on human settlements, coastal defenses, military installations, energy infrastructures, water resources, and innumerable other coastal investments (Cooley et al., 2022; Fox-Kemper et al., 2021; Oppenheimer et al., 2019). Planning for the risks and hazards associated with sea-level rise requires future projections based on the best possible science (Hamlington et al., 2021; Kopp et al., 2019). The geologic record documents that global sea level has risen and fallen dramatically over the course of Earth's history in relation to past global climate events, including the waxing and waning of the great continental ice sheets during the Pleistocene (Imbrie & Imbrie, 1979; Murray-Wallace & Woodroffe, 2017). Since the potential for sea-level rise as a result of global climate change has long been recognized (Hill, 1947), there has been a long history of studies that project global-mean sea level decades or centuries into the future (Garner et al., 2018). Although central estimates of these future projections have remained fairly consistent, particularly for lower-emissions scenarios and nearer-term targets such as the year 2050, high-end (worst-case) estimates have been more variable, especially for higher emissions or longer time horizons like 2100 or 2300 (Horton et al., 2018). Discrepancies between global-mean sea-level projections, conditioned on emissions, have largely to do with the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. The ice sheets have the potential to render the greatest contribution to future sea-level rise (Marshall, 2012), but the relationship between ice-sheet wastage and local, regional, and global warming remains deeply uncertain (DeConto et al., 2021; Edwards et al., 2021; Kopp et al., 2017; Noble et al., 2020). Projecting future sea-level rise has been, to adapt the popular phrase, like peering through an ice sheet, darkly. Gaining a clearer view requires identifying key uncertainties related to the ice sheets and their evolution and promoting understanding of the most important underlying processes. Three new papers published in this volume of Earth's Future do precisely that, taking advantage of complementary approaches to advance understanding of future sea-level rise, with a crystalized focus on the ice sheets. Grinsted et al. (2022) constrain the transient sea-level sensitivity to global warming using observations and models. Introduced by Grinsted and Christensen (2021) in analogy to the established notion of the transient climate response (Planton, 2013), this defines the change in the rate of global-mean sea-level rise with respect to changes in global-mean surface temperature. Grinsted et al. (2022) build on previous efforts by considering the most recent generation of climate, ice-sheet, and glacier models, and by quantifying sensitivities of individual contributors to global sea level rise, including the ice sheets. The authors find that, for most contributors, sensitivities are nearly constant, meaning that rates of global-mean sea-level rise scale linearly with global-mean surface temperatures. They also find that the balance temperature, at which sea-level rates are zero, is close to the preindustrial value of ∼1.1°C below present (Gulev et al., 2021), which demonstrates that halting sea-level rise would require substantial global cooling. Perhaps most intriguingly, Grinsted et al. (2022) find a significant discrepancy between models and observations, namely that observations show that sea-level rates are more sensitive to surface-temperature changes than the models anticipate. Bamber et al. (2022) use structured expert judgment to identify ice-sheet and climate processes responsible for uncertainty in future sea-level rise. This approach brings together calibrated expert responses to answer deeply uncertain questions when process understanding of ice-sheet behavior and relevant boundary conditions is limited. Expanding upon earlier work by Bamber et al. (2019), this study quantifies the relative contributions of accumulation, ice discharge, and meltwater runoff for the Greenland, West Antarctica, and East Antarctica ice sheets to uncertainty in global-mean sea-level rise under low and high warming scenarios such that global-mean surface temperature stabilizes in 2100 at 2°C and 5°C above preindustrial, respectively. They determine that Greenland surface mass balance and ice discharge from West Antarctica represent the dominant uncertainties on global-mean sea-level rise from ice sheets in the twenty-first century. Uncertainties associated with the East Antarctic ice sheet, these authors find, play an important role only for longer timescales and high warming. van de Wal et al. (2022) generate high-end estimates of sea-level rise for risk-averse practitioners. Coproduced by scientists and practitioners using a framework introduced by Stammer et al. (2019), the estimates generated by this study are distinct from, but complementary to, the corresponding values reported in the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Fox-Kemper et al., 2021) because different approaches are taken to quantify the contribution of land-ice wastage to future sea-level rise. Emphasizing actionable science and highlighting the central role that credible, salient, and legitimate evidence plays in adaptive planning, the authors synthesize published estimates of plausible scenarios derived from transparent process understanding that incorporates uncertainties and ambiguities across models and experts. They obtain high-end global-mean sea-level-rise estimates of up to 0.9 m by 2100 and 2.5 m by 2300 relative to 1995–2014 for a global warming of 2°C by 2100. These values become 1.6 and 10.4 m by 2100 and 2300, respectively, for 5°C of global warming by 2100, underscoring the benefits of mitigation. Together, these studies stitch together a mosaic that throws into relief the most pressing uncertainties related to ice-sheet evolution and its contribution to sea-level rise. Grinsted et al. (2022) hypothesize that mismatches between models and observations may arise from poor representation of ice flow and sliding on the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Antarctic Peninsula in models, which results in simulated ice discharge being too insensitive to temperature changes. Bamber et al. (2022) argue that uncertainties on future Greenland surface mass balance largely stem from uncertain albedo processes, such as changing cloud cover, surface darkening and debris cover, and the seasonality of air temperature and precipitation, whereas uncertainties on future ice discharge from West Antarctica are mainly controlled by ice-shelf buttressing and initiation of marine ice sheet and ice cliff instabilities. Also important, underscore van de Wal et al. (2022), are uncertainties associated with melt-albedo and height-surface mass balance feedbacks, atmospheric rivers and blocking events, tipping points and timing of ice-shelf collapse around Antarctica, ice-ocean interactions and circulation of circumpolar deep water, and basal friction near grounding lines, among other processes. To inform coastal adaptation and planning, resolving these issues will be necessary, but it will not be sufficient. Improved understanding of other local, regional, and global processes will also be required. How much the seas will rise from global ocean warming and thermal expansion depends on not only how much the oceans warm, but also where that warming predominantly occurs, whether mostly near the surface or in the deep abyss (Gille, 2004; Piecuch & Ponte, 2014; Schanze & Schmitt, 2013). Quantifying the amount that local sea level will deviate from the global average due to ocean dynamics demands skillful modeling of both large-scale features of the general circulation, including gyres and overturning, but also the more granular details of coastal flows, shelf circulations, and exchanges with the open ocean on mesoscales and submesoscales (Gawarkiewicz et al., 2018; Holt et al., 2017; Little et al., 2019). It will also be imperative to make best use of recent advances in geophysical modeling and remote sensing to anticipate relative sea-level rise from coastal land subsidence (Buzzanga et al., 2020; Shirzaei et al., 2021; Wöppelmann & Marcos, 2016). The most useful science to support risk management will therefore result from interdisciplinary sea-level researchers working to address open questions related to the evolution of the cryosphere in a warming world, as highlighted by Bamber et al. (2022), Grinsted et al. (2022), and van de Wal et al. (2022), as well as the ocean, atmosphere, and solid Earth (Hamlington et al., 2021; Kopp et al., 2019). The existing Iselin Marine Facility will be replaced by the Complex for Waterfront Access To Exploration and Research, which is envisioned as the next-generation marine research facility supporting seagoing operations in Woods Hole (Munier & McGee, 2021). Informed by modern sea-level science, the initial build optimized for a median target of 0.76 m will allow for a higher-end future deck elevation of 1.22 m above the current dock structure. The adaptive design approach therefore takes advantage of the contemporary state of knowledge, but also looks forward to future scientific progress that clarifies these outstanding questions related to sea-level rise and the ice sheets. In this way, sea-level science directly contributes to the resiliency and sustainability of critical infrastructure enabling ocean research for the balance of this century, which in turn will advance our understanding of the changing global climate system. The authors acknowledge support from the Ocean and Climate Innovation Accelerator, Joint Initiative Awards Fund from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and President's Innovation Fund at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Helpful comments from Rob Munier and Hannah Piecuch on an earlier version of the manuscript are gratefully acknowledged. The authors declare no conflicts of interest relevant to this study. Data were not used, nor created for this research.