Things are looking wet in the future. Photo: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash
A new report on rising sea levels in the United States contains some alarming data. According to the authors of the study, sea levels are predicted to rise as much over the next three decades as they did in the entirety of the past century. That’s bad news for a multitude of reasons: high-tide flooding will increase in frequency and severity, storm surges will be higher, and coastal infrastructures and sensitive areas will get a heavy dose of saltwater. Researchers are confident that by 2050, sea level rise will be increased by 10-12 inches. Now, a foot doesn’t sound all that bad, but the consequences would be disastrous.
The report, which was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and contributed to by multiple other agencies, holds dire warnings. “Sea level rise will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach farther inland,” it says. “By 2050, ‘moderate’ (typically damaging) flooding is expected to occur, on average, more than 10 times as often as it does today, and can be intensified by local factors.”
Although the report isn’t good news, it does, at least, provide researchers with valuable information about how to proceed as we move into the future. Since the turn of the millennium, coastal cities have seen high-tide flood events double in frequency. Those events, which used to be relatively rare, are now almost commonplace, but we’re not prepared for the havoc they can wreak.
“Decades ago, powerful storms were what typically caused coastal flooding,” NOAA explained. Today, due to sea level rise, “even common wind events and seasonal high tides regularly cause [high-tide flooding] within coastal communities, affecting homes and businesses, overloading stormwater and wastewater systems, infiltrating coastal groundwater aquifers with saltwater, and stressing coastal wetlands and estuarine ecosystems.”
Some 40 percent of the population in the United States lives within 60 miles of the coast, so the impacts will be heavy ones. “What I will say is that the magnitude of these impacts, direct and cascading, will be high,” said Nicole LeBeof, the director of NOAA’s National Ocean Service, at a news conference. “…There will be highly variable impacts along those coastlines, but there’s no denying that a large portion of our economy and revenue and tax base are right there, front and center.”
It gets even more alarming — if we continue on the road we’re currently traveling on, at least. If nothing is done, we (well, some of us, anyway) could be looking at as much as a seven-foot sea level rise by the end of this century. If, however, we’re able to curb global warming to around 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the NOAA estimates a 2-foot rise by 2100.
There’s a big difference between two and seven feet, and there’s a reason for the uncertainty. What happens in the future isn’t yet known, of course, and neither is the reaction of the world’s ice sheets that would be the primary drivers of sea level rise. If common sense is any indicator, though, ice melts faster the hotter it gets. And the hotter it gets, the worse climate change will be. It’s that runaway effect researchers have been warning us about for decades, and we’re on the brink of it — or just over, depending on how doom and gloom you want to get.
Worst case scenario? Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier collapses. Known as the “Doomsday Glacier,” its destruction would lead to irreversible and catastrophic changes all over the planet. Thwaites Glacier is no ordinary glacier. At about the size of Florida, it holds enough ice to raise the level of the sea around the world nearly three feet. It also serves as a backstop to glaciers behind it.
“We know where these different events could be triggered that would lead to rapid sea level rise, potentially,” Ben Hamlington told CNN. Hamlington is the lead for the sea level change team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a co-author on the report referenced above. “For right now, it’s important that we build that uncertainty into our scenarios, that possibility of that happening, and that’s what we’ve done.”
