In Miami, it’s no secret that sunny day flooding is occurring more often, nor that rising sea levels and climate change are to blame. But, as is often the case when you drill down into the inner workings of our planet, the full story is a bit more complicated.
Virginia’s Tangier Island is drowning. It’s accessible only by boat, besieged by both sinking land and rising sea, and has shrunk to one-third the size it was in 1850. On Wednesday, President Trump called its mayor, James Eskridge, to say not to worry about sea level rise.
Using a new computer model, scientists predict that upwards of 67 percent of Southern California beaches could be severely damaged by rising sea levels in the next 80 years.
The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to raise global sea levels 24 feet should it all melt. And a massive melt-out is exactly what seems to have happened about a million years ago, according to a groundbreaking analysis of a unique geologic sample from Greenland’s rocky underbelly.
On an forbidding shoreline at the bottom of the world, the prodigious ice sheets of West Antarctica dead-end in the Amundsen sea. For decades, scientists have been monitoring this interface of rock, ice and ocean, in order to understand how quickly it’ll retreat as the planet warms up. A new study shows that three of…
If you’re planning to live in the Big Apple for the foreseeable future, it’s time to invest in flood insurance and a gondola. A new study finds that nine-foot floods, like those produced by Hurricane Sandy, will be three to 17 times more frequent by the end of the century, thanks to sea level rise and shifting storm…
In October 2012, just a few days before Hurricane Sandy slammed into New Jersey, it was churning north past the narrow strip of white sand beach separating NASA’s most celebrated spaceport from the sea.
It’s a scorching midsummer day, and the sawgrass is still under a pale blue sky. Waist-deep in water and sinking slowly into the muck, I fend off mosquitos as a man from South Florida’s Water Management District mixes a bag of salt into a hot tub-sized bucket on the side of the road. Thirty feet away in the marsh,…
Something strange is happening to one of the coldest places on Earth. Dazzling blue lakes are blooming like summer wildflowers atop the East Antarctic ice sheet’s Langhovde Glacier. And that’s got scientists worried—because they’ve seen these lakes before.
On a tiny island at the end of the world, a lonely weather station is slowly tumbling off a cliffside. It’s a perfect metaphor for the state of our planet. Say hello to Vize Island, Russia. It won’t be around much longer.
As our planet heats up, the pace of sea level rise is expected to quicken, making it harder for cities like Miami to stay above water. But since 1992, scientists have studied Earth’s mean sea level via satellites, and they’ve watched it rise at a steady 3 millimeters per year—no evidence for acceleration.
Real estate database company Zillow is warning that nearly 1.9 million homes in the United States could be flooded by the end of the century. That’s about two percent of the nation’s total housing stock, amounting to $882 billion in value.
Celebrity cheese puff and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a problem: climate change. Despite dismissing our global planetary crisis as a Chinese hoax, the real estate mogul’s prized real estate is directly in the line of fire. In thirty years, Tump’s Mar-a-Lago club could be under a foot…
In 2014, New York City funded a proposal called the “Big U,” a 10-mile barrier around Lower Manhattan to prevent the devastating effects of both storm surges and sea-level rise. The biggest strength of the $540 million project was that the infrastructure would do double-duty by adding parks and public space around the…
Over the weekend, my social media feeds were draped in neon orange as the world exuberantly shared the first photos of Christo’s latest work, The Floating Piers, a 1.8-mile walkway across an Italian lake. It is easily the artist’s most ambitious piece from an engineering perspective—and one that actually adds value to…
As humanity continues to pump carbon into the sky, the models that predict Earth’s future are becoming increasingly complex and detailed. And yet, they’re zeroing in on a simple conclusion: if we don’t get our act together fast, Florida is totally screwed. Along with a bunch of other coastal cities around the world.
Over the summer, pioneering climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues penned an apocalyptic study predicting that the deadliest consequences of climate change will be felt within decades. That paper precipitated a raucous debate, but now, it’s been accepted for publication, heralding a sea shift in attitudes…
Climate change is often seen as a problem for generations to come, but as our freakish winter weather has shown, we’re already living the future we created. Need more proof? An entire Native American community is now going to be resettled, before it gets swallowed by the rising seas.
In the absence of humans, global sea level might have dropped a smidge last century, according to a detailed analysis of our past and future climate published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Instead, sea level rose about 5.5 inches—faster than it has in at least 27 centuries.
If humans don’t stop burning fossil fuels soon, we’ll be paying for it for the next 10,000 years. That’s the conclusion of a perspective paper penned by nearly two dozen leading Earth scientists, which was published today in Nature Climate Change.