All the cities in Imperial County will be gone, and seawater will extend northward to submerge Coachella, Indio and most of La Quinta. The largest area of damage in Southern California will be in the low desert, as the Salton Trough fills with water once the low divide between the trough and the Sea of Cortez is overtopped. The rugged coast south of Newport Beach will limit the broad scope of damage to the South Coast, but downtown San Diego will be gone west of Interstate 5, and the mesas that run up and down the coast will become peninsulas as the canyons that separate them flood. Signal Hill and Costa Mesa will be the largest of a few islands still poking above the waves, but Long Beach will otherwise be history, as will Westminster, and Carson, and enterprising survivors will be able to buy beachfront property in West Compton. The low spot in the coast where Marina Del Rey is now will become a bay stretching to the Baldwin Hills, and a larger bay will stretch from Gardena to Irvine. Surf will lap up against the 101 north of the Lost City of Oxnard. Santa Barbara will be hit hard, and Goleta essentially wiped out. | Screen capture from Firetree flood mapping tool.Ĭoastal land in the state's southern half won't suffer damage as extensive in terms of sheer area submerged, but still, entire cities will vanish beneath the swollen Pacific. Imagine seawater cresting the 405 in Culver City. Not that the affluent get off scot-free in NorCal: tony Sausalito and Larkspur and the southern half of the Napa Valley will drown. East Palo Alto would be gone, along with West Oakland and almost all of the city of Richmond. It's worth noting that in the industrialized Bay Area, the majority of places inundated are where poor people are more likely to live. Water would reach as far as downtown San Jose. The South of Market and Mission Districts in San Francisco would sink beneath the rising Bay, and Potrero Hill would become an island. The cities surrounding San Francisco Bay would be almost as hard-hit, with the majority of the flatlands submerged. Needless to say, water intakes and conduits in this area that send fresh water to Southern California would be useless. Sacramento and Stockton would be submerged under up to 40 feet of water, with both rail lines and major highways put permanently out of service. Worst-hit would be the Sacramento Delta area: a giant inland sea would open up running from Gridley to near Merced. But the places where coastal and interior land would be inundated are some of the most-developed places in California, and damages would likely run beyond hundreds of triillions of dollars. The California coast is rugged and steep in many places, and along much of the state's coast a 21-meter sea level rise wouldn't change the map all that much. The map doesn't have a setting for 21 meters, so we've used the 20 meter setting to make our projections more conservative, if that is the right word. We've made use of a handy tool created a few years ago by, which you can explore easily. But we did wonder what a 21-meter sea level rise would mean to California.Īs it turns out, it would mean an environmental and economic catastrophe. We're not in a position to judge the veracity of Box's prognosis for our planet's ice caps, though he does have impressive research chops and credentials. He does tell Mooney, however, that we can postpone that eventual catastrophic melt by slowing down the activities causing the problem in the first place, especially burning fossil fuels. That's 21 meters, or about the height of a six-story building.īox doesn't state when the rising seas will reach that point. According to Box, despite recent articles downplaying the threat of melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, a deadly combination of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, atmospheric methane levels already at record levels and increasing, and global soot pollution darkening ice sheets has already locked in enough melt in Greenland and Antarctica to cause 69 feet of sea level rise. Mooney quotes Ohio State glaciologist Jason Box as making the apocalyptic pronouncement, which seriously outstrips commonly-quoted estimates of sea level rise by a factor of at least three. If that's true, what would that mean for California? Science writer Chris Mooney offers an incredibly frightening prognosis for sea level in an article Thursday on the website Grist, quoting a glacier expert as saying human industrial activity has already locked in 69 feet of sea level rise. Long Beach Bay | Screen capture from Firetree flood mapping tool.
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