In the recently released article “Coastal Cities Could Flood Three Times a Week by 2045,” John Upton, the author, says that floods could occur several times a week on average by 2045 along the mid-Atlantic coastline, where seas have been rising faster than nearly anywhere else, and where lands are sagging under the weight of geological changes. New York City, one of the major coastline cities, has always encountered floods during hurricanes, storms, or even gusty winds. I remembered that New York City was paralyzed by Hurricane Sandy, the subway was flooded, my aunts’ house was totally flooded, and there were long lasting power outages which made half of Manhattan loose power. As we saw from Hurricane Sandy, disastrous floods claimed people’s lives and their property. You could imagine what would happen if New York City is flooded three times a week.
(courtesy of the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
The flooding would generally cluster around the new and full moons,” said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a Union of Concerned Scientists analyst who helped produce the new study. “Many tide cycles in a row would bring flooding, this would peter out, and would then be followed by a string of tides without flooding.”
Seas have recently been rising worldwide by an average of about an inch a decade, a rate of change that’s accelerating as global warming expands oceans and causes ice to melt. The East Coast endured sea level rise at more than twice the global rate from 2002 to 2014.
