A new study from NOAA says that sea level is likely to rise about a foot by 2050. A foot may not seem like much, but that's only because you're not looking at it right. Consider this:
The study says that sea level will rise about 16 inches in the Gulf Coast. I've chosen Tampa as a photogenic example and marked off the nearby area of the ocean. If 15,000 square miles of ocean increases by 16 inches, that's about 500 billion cubic feet of new water, give or take a few hundred billion. So when a big hurricane churns its way into western Florida, it's got a whole lot more water to push into Tampa Bay.
These numbers are made up just to give you an idea of what this means. When you think about sea level you should think about flooding. And when you think about flooding you should think about the total volume of water likely to be slammed into your coast. A small rise in height creates a prodigious increase in water volume, and volume is what matters when Cat 5 winds come calling.
I moved inland for a reason and with some elevation but I could be inundated by a volcano. No where seems to be safe anymore.
Sea level rise might turn my water view property into waterfront. I'm around the point from where the lahar is expected and enough inland to be safe from the tsunami. "The Really Big One" (earth quake) could still get me though.
Does it? Does a hurricane push water from the entire water column down to the seabed, or is it pushing on the first N feet of water?
Now, if the sea level is starting a foot or sixteen inches higher then certainly the storm surge from the hurricane can get further inland. I wonder though if the volume of water it pushes is much different.
@rick_jones, that was my question as well. Not arguing that sea level rising is good, but I don't believe Kevin accurately describes why it's bad.
It's both. The surge will get further inland, and due to higher level to begin with, more water will be pushed by the storm.
Here is a an easy to understand article about this:
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/570522-sea-level-rise-and-hurricanes-in-it-for-the-long-haul
"Most obviously, sea-level rise makes storm surges higher. If the sea level is starting off a few feet higher, then storm surge will automatically be a few feet higher too.
This is a big deal. Coastal infrastructure is designed to withstand a certain amount of storm surge. As a storm surge gets higher, those design limits get exceeded. There’s a huge difference in impacts between “withstand” and “not withstand.”
Inland from the immediate coast, the impacts are even greater. Higher sea level makes barrier islands that much shallower, reducing the first line of defense for storm surges farther inland. It’s like lowering the levees: storm surge can move inland more easily, and the amount of water moving inland is greater."
I seem to recall from reading books about submarines that in really extreme weather you can detect wave action down to about 60 feet depth (that's average depth; if the waves are 20 feet from trough to crest, then the 60 foot average will vary from 50 to 70 feet as waves go by).
I would guess that, very roughly, at water depths greater than 60 feet the depth of water doesn't matter; in shallower water it does, because, as you say, in shallower water the hurricane is pushing the entire water column down to the seabed.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 20-30 years. I live in South Tampa and can walk to water in two directions (East and West). My lot is currently 4 (or 5, can't remember) feet above sea level. If a cat 5 hurricane came into Tampa Bay my house would be underwater regardless. But if sea level goes up a foot even minor storms may be an issue.
What makes it even more perverse in southern Florida is that the ground is hollow karst limestone, and you can't simply wall off the sea because it can come up from the ground during floods.
No idea what happens to Miami down the line. I can't imagine they'd abandon it, but it's wild to think of it becoming Venice on the Caribbean - a city built largely on stilts, concrete pylons, and elevated roadways.
Well, Miami's got the money to do it.
Instead of house boats, it would have to be a city boat.
Hugh Jackman made this movie.
Miami Beach (and several other barrier island beach areas) will disappear within the lifetimes of my grandchildren.
I think you need to dive a bit more into the report. By 2060, it suggests Pensacola/Tampa Bay will have a sea level rise of ~2.3 feet over 2005 levels.
Sea level rise is probably going to be worse than that, arising from the issues of exacerbated erosion and fixed structures within the new flood plain which tends to raise the localized flood plain level -- ref NFIP/FEMA flood zone protection requirements re infill of flood plain.
Now Kevin, it's well known that something something million-year cycles, something sunspots something, and only 150 years of detailed meteorological records, and also cows and methane and swamp gas, and something something the Lord's Plan, and besides, what do you want me to do, give up my truck?!?
Wondering what this would mean for the shorelines of the world, a little trig (and correct me if I'm wrong; it's been half a century) will show that a rise in sea level of "h" will cause the ocean to encroach onto the land a distance of:
d = h / sin(a)
where a is the angle of the beach's slope. For a 5 degree slope and 1 foot rise, that would be near 12 feet that the water would move inland. For 18", make that 17 feet. And apparently, 5 degrees is pretty steep...
Where I live, the rise along a lot of the coast is 90 degrees.
Couple of other things to think about, any arable land that gets flooded by salt water is going to have problems producing after.
Also
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/01/thwaites-doomsday-glacier-monitoring-research-sea-level-rise/
Thwaites—aka the Doomsday Glacier—is deteriorating fast, losing 50 billion tons of ice to the sea each year. Stretching 75 miles across the coast of Antarctica, encompassing an area about the size of Florida, it’s currently responsible for 4 percent of global sea level rise. (It straddles land and sea: The bit on land is known as an “ice sheet,” but where it floats it’s an “ice shelf.”) If it melted completely, the glacier would not only contribute over two feet of sea level rise, but as it slid into the ocean, it would also tug on the glaciers surrounding it, further destabilizing them. That’d add another eight feet of sea level rise.
The Dark Snow project has been following it...from the other end. Greenland is pouring itself into the sea.
I'd heard of their work but didn't know their name, thanks.
The link above is a month old and in conjunction with Wired, who just released another article with more info earlier today
https://www.wired.com/story/serious-salty-trouble-may-be-brewing-under-antarctic-glaciers/
It explains in more detail how aspects down there aren't covered in current models. Also a freshly broken iceberg has been stopping two ships from doing observations as of a couple of days ago.
Florida will just pray the swelling tides away, like they do for anything/anyone else they don’t believe in or respect.
It wouldn't disturb me all that much if Florida would totally disappear. Slowly enough for people to get off first, of course. We will miss the Everglades, of course, but the giant pythons will migrate into the interior, so that's all good.
Agreed. I went to Florida State for grad school solely bc they gave me a free ride for 2 year including living expenses. Have zero desire to ever return. Everything there is trashy.
I would feel bad and respect them more had I not met so many people at FSU vehemently opposed to the identity groups I identify with. And I came from North Carolina, so I was really shocked to find out Tallahassee is more like southern Alabama/Georgia than purplish NC.
The average elevation of Miami Beach is 4'.
And they are already experiencing "sunny day" flooding. If I owned building in Miami Beach I would sell ASAP.
There must be a gerrymandering opportunity here. Maybe involving house boats. For sure there's going to be a bit of compression of the voting blocks. Refugees if you will. That should be interesting.
I *just* sold a property on the Alabama coast that was inland but on the intercostal waterway and couldn't be more relived. I'd vacationed down there for the last 20 years and have watched storms - not even hurricanes - push more and more water ashore each year.
There's a lot of people living in denial down there, I'm betting this prediction is just like all the rest, they're underestimating things and the worst case scenario is going to blow by us in no time.
Might finally force the coastal Dems inland solving the sorting issue.
This week I visited a refinery site in Belle Chasse, Louisiana for the first time since Hurricane Ida. The refinery was inundated and the damage was so extensive the refinery is being decommissioned as not viable for restart. At one point I was in an area that had 7-9 feet of water standing when the damage assessment team first arrived. They had to wait until the water level dropped and then they worked in waders. The area was the heart of a key process unit; lots of tanks, heat exchangers, electrical panels/interconnects, etc. All submerged in salt water thanks to the hurricane. Pretty much the entire site suffered the same damage.
Quite a bit of infrastructure is built at or slightly above (current) sea level along the Gulf Coast. We've seen this happen with Harvey, Ida and pretty much any tropical storm of consequence.
This infrastructure can't simply be relocated.
I see all these stories about people moving to coastal Florida to escape all the wokeness or something of CA or NY and I'm like, dude, you are soooooo fucked in a couple of years. Hope your house is one of those ones on stilts you see in Louisiana on the Gulf Coast.
I don't think you got the physics quite right here. When a wind blows it will move water down to a depth (depending on wind speed). If you add a foot of water that moving layer will just be located one foot up.
However, a foot in elevation can correspond to a horizontal distance anywhere from a few inches to a few hundred yards depending on how steep the terrain is. Large areas that never had floods will be in the flood zone.
*What azumbrunn said.
Very little changes as a result of raising the water x amount, it depends on the slope of the land at the new coastline, etc., compared to the old coastline. And the value of the things that could be harmed, their structure and orientation in the affected areas compared to the old affected area.
If the new shoreline were steeper than the old shoreline, for instance, flooding could be less impactful after sea level rise.
The thing is, the insurance and reinsurance industries could do something about this right now by pricing the insurance of coastal property in the southern US accordingly, and refusing to insure fossil fuel production, which is the source of the problem. Unfortunately, one of the ways the insurance industry recoups their losses from climate change-induced disasters is by investing in -- you guessed it -- high risk/high payoff fossil fuel exploration. It's insane -- like hospitals investing in tobacco companies to offset the cost of treating lung cancer patients.
https://www.insureourfuture.us/updates/2021/11/2/new-report-us-insurance-companies-undermine-climate-targets-scorecard
Already been done in NC.
Got so pricey the National Flood insurance program now includes flooding of ocean front property because private insurers just couldn't pay out that much money any more and rich homeowners couldn't afford the rising rates.
So they turned to the government but gave the insurance companies the program to run - and very profitably for them I might add.
So that little old lady living in a marginal flood zone in Iowa along a river bank is contributing HER tax dollars to insure those multi-million dollar homes in Tampa Bay, or Tybee(sp?) Island SC
Capitalism, American style.
Yeah
It's bad enough that the insurers raised rates so much the wealthy complained that they couldn't afford it and turned to - the government to bail them out.
Of course the insurance lobby then got involved and convinced the government that they had the expertise to run the program more effectively than the government did.
I am surprised that Middle American isn't rebelling over this
But they are oddly silent
Now you have me thinking about "A.I. Artificial Intelligence"
Another way to look at volume is this. The total area of the world's oceans is about 150 million square miles. A one foot rise is 150,000,000/5280 = ~30,000 cubic miles of water. One cubic mile is 147 billion cubic feet.
We are forgetting that as sea level rises so does the water table UNDER those waterfront homes and more importantly businesses.
109 Nuclear reactors are situated on ocean front properties with MOST having storage pools onsite for spent rods world wide. Fukishima on a world wide scale?
Look, we can down play this all we want and I can hear it now "It's ONLY a foot of water". Think about this. The Federal Reserve in NY has the storage vaults 25 feet BELOW current sea level. Wall St sits 20 feet above sea level but would be flooded by a Cat 3 hurricane which would over wash the barriers around lower Manhattan.
Remember the pics of when the Mississippi or Missouri river floods? Caskets get lifted OUT of the ground due to rising water tables. Watch as waterfront homes collapse into the ocean. Already 2 here on the Outer Banks of NC have done so within the last few months.
Rising water tables destabilize whats underneath our feet
Meh
Just after I typed that I see this pop up
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/surfside-condo-collapse-salt-groundwater-rcna16473
The picture at the top of the story says all you need to say about it