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I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!! https://www.floodmap.n
by gnatman 5y ago
I just went looking for a map to see how different coastlines would look with a 200m sea level rise. It's, unsurprisingly, significant!!
https://www.floodmap.net/ https://www.floodmap.net/
- arno_v 5y agoSurprisingly if you put it to 20 meters the effect globally seem insignificant. Although 80% of my own country would be flooded, so that's not great.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoOn a global scale, sure, but as you pointed out for some spots it wouldn't be good. Both Miami and New York (to a lesser extent) would be having a bad time.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI guess you mean the shape of the countries doesn't change much? iirc the majority of Earth's population lives on coastlines, most major cities will be inundated
- lijogdfljk 5y agoThey'll have a _long_ time to migrate though, no?
- jazzyjackson 5y agoThe rise in sea level is something of a misnomer, because the real damage comes in storm surges. Even a 1cm rise increases the amount of water that can pushed inland by *checks notes* a whole helluva lot. So while manhattan isn't going to be put underwater even after a whole foot of sea level rise (predicted by 2100), the storms it has to survive will be much worse. People won't move just from a little water in the roads (just look at Miami), I think even in the year 2099 you'll have a hard time getting new yorkers to move to ohio, but once a storm comes through and destroys their housing they will have to find somewhere else to live.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago
- bigthymer 5y agoHousing is super expensive for people now. All of that coastal infrastructure will need to be rebuilt.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoBut housing isn't expensive because it's hard to build. It's expensive because building it isn't allowed. If it all had to be rebuilt, that would be much cheaper than trying to build it under existing conditions.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoYeah, I was looking at this and thinking "At 20m, basically the entire Eastern and Southern Seaboard of the US is gone."
- Maursault 5y agoNot at all. Those living along the shore have flood insurance which will continue to pay for restoration of the coastline.
- ehnto 5y agoInsurance isn't an endless bucket of money, and it's also going to adapt. Eventually you just won't be able to get insurance for properties in areas like that. Just look at the floods in New Orleans or the current flooding along the east coast of Australia, I doubt there's enough money to make all those affected whole again. I think insurance may be the main driver for when people actually decide to move. People are pretty resilient, but if you can't get a home loan because you can't get insurance, people won't keep living there.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoI live in NJ. As I understand it, the state gov - via taxpayers, obviously - subsidizes property insurance at the shore (as NJ calls the beach). That generosity isn't endless.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoThese communities are wealthy and influential. Places like Buffalo will go bankrupt keeping places like NYC above water.
- Sebb767 5y agoThe big problem, as a sister comment pointed out, is that, for various reasons, a lot of people live close to the coast line. And a lot of people having to move was historically never really a good for peace, plus we loose a lot of agriculturally valuable land in the process.
- _0w8t 5y agoTransportation by water is like 50 times cheaper than by land and it has been like that for at least the last 2000 years. So most people live either along the coast or along rivers.
- scruple 5y agoAt 20 meters, the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles, and parts of Orange county are significantly impacted.
- rich_sasha 5y agoWell if California goes, we might as well all pack up, civilisation is over.
- scruple 5y agoOkay. So what do you think will happen when a significant chunk of the United States economic power is under water?
- oceanplexian 5y agoI suspect it will look like Amsterdam, or Venice, or any number of cities that figured out how to cope with existing at or below sea level.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gus_massa 5y agoFrom https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating-future-sea-levels https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating... > In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5). By 2300, seas could stand as much as 5 meters higher under the worst-case scenario. I guess thy will migrate the datacenters before 2300.
- refurb 5y agoMostly knowledge workers. Remote work already reducing potential impact.
- 5y ago
- r00fus 5y agoAnd as Lex Luthor pointed out in Superman1, there may be profit to be had. So honestly, two sides to that coin, amirite?
- stevenwoo 5y agosomething like only 10 meters is necessary to depopulate large part of Florida (due to loss land and freshwater aquifers) and turn part of central California into a salt marsh and start reducing the USA's most productive farmland.
- jazzyjackson 5y agowas always curious about how below sea level works there, how much sea rise does it take before death valley becomes the new dead sea?
- Jtsummers 5y agoThat is a flaw with this site, it seems to "fill in" Death Valley even with no change in sea level. The best way to read the map is to look at what new blue areas are connected to oceans, rivers, and seas. If they aren't, then it's unlikely they will be flooded as illustrated in the map at that new sea level. Death Valley, to go with that, is still detached from any oceans or rivers until almost a 600 m sea level rise.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoRight on, thanks for the answer.
- jjcon 5y agoGood to keep in mind that best estimates right now have sea level rising by less than 0.7 meters through 2100. 10 meters may happen some day but it will be a very slow process. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-foot-of-sea-level-rise-by-2050 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
- r00fus 5y agoEcological estimates have been shown to wildly conservative. Who ten years ago had in their ecologic prediction bingo card that we'd have rampant wildfires globally and 118 degree ground temps in the Arctic Circle by 2020?
- jjcon 5y agoCertainly significant but that also happens on a massive time scale - the best estimates have us up 0.7 meters in 2100. https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-foot-of-sea-level-rise-by-2050 https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-coastline-to-see-up-to-...
- Gravityloss 5y agoUnfortunately, that's just linear extrapolation from current rates. Ice sheet collapse can be extremely nonlinear, accelerating rapidly. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05003-z.pdf?origin=ppub https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05003-z.pdf?origi... Or watch any of Eric Rignot's presentations in youtube. The term is Marine Ice Sheet Instability. This video in my opinion gives a fun demonstration of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdaAKIkpKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLdaAKIkpKA Miscommunicating sea level rise risk is a big problem.
- jjcon 5y agoFalse, the long term NOAA models are far more complex than simple extrapolation (though that is of course a part of any forecast) and they certainly aren’t linear. Feel free to read up on them yourself: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-report-sections.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelr...
- Gravityloss 5y agoThanks, I was wrong. The report is good reading.
- wrycoder 5y agoBut you must have seen something I didn’t. See my comment nearby.
- wrycoder 5y ago> Global mean sea level, or the average height of the ocean surface, has risen 6 - 8 inches (15 - 20 centimeters) since 1920. In the continental U.S., relative sea level has risen about 10 - 12 inches (25 - 30 centimeters) over the same period. Observational data from tide gauges and satellites also show that sea level rise, both globally and along the continental U.S., is accelerating, with more than a third of that rise having occurred in the past two and a half decades (see NOAA and NASA portals for altimeter-based global rates and NOAA for local tide gauge rates). So, 30% of the normal one foot per century (somewhat less worldwide) happened in the last 25% of the time. That’s not a big acceleration, that’s measurement error. And yet this report says the rate of rise will nearly triple over the next thirty years. This is simply not plausible. Generally, the report reduced the predictions. Also, they eliminated the 2.5 meter (!) scenario.
- 988747 5y agoThis map is weird. I put 20m sea rise and it shows Caspian Sea expanding, roughly doubling its size. But the thing is: Caspian Sea isn't a sea at all, it's a lake (named "sea" only because of its size), not connected to oceans in any way - why would its level rise at all? Also, it is nice to see that my family home is safe until about 350 meters rise (although it would be located on a small island in that case)
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoIt's possible it's the algorithm has a bug for stuff like this, but I did notice that with, for example, 40m sea rise it shows a connection from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
- jl6 5y agoInteresting that even at a ridiculous, unprecedented 500m sea level rise, there are still substantial areas of dry land. It would be a radically different world, and a smaller one for us land based animals, but it doesn’t seem outlandish that civilization could persist.
- nerdponx 5y agoIt's difficult to imagine the extent and depth of suffering that humans will endure during the transition.
- krona 5y agoThe Netherlands didn't endure much suffering. In fact, quite the opposite.
- pchristensen 5y agoThe highest point in the Netherlands is 322 meters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalserberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalserberg), so even the mighty Dutch might have a problem with a 500m rise in sea level.
- ehnto 5y agoI think they're referring to the increasing intensity of severe weather.
- nerdponx 5y agoNot only that, but also the massive loss of land that is currently dense urban area, and the massive loss of land in general. There will have to be huge reconfigurations of where people live and what people's livelihoods are. I am not optimistic that such changes can be managed among several billion humans without war, famine, etc.
- refurb 5y agoSeems par for the course of human history no?
- totetsu 5y agoSolves the question of who gets Ukraine..
- puglr 5y agoWhat a great tool for generating fictional maps.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago