Scientist: ‘Miami, As We Know It Today Is Doomed. It’s Not A Question Of If. It’s A Question Of When

[octoberlib]

Jeff Goodell has a must-read piece in Rolling Stone, “Goodbye, Miami: By century’s end, rising sea levels will turn the nation’s urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin.”
Goodell has talked to many of the leading experts on Miami including Harold Wanless, chair of University of Miami’s geological sciences, department, source of the headline quote. The reason climate change dooms Miami is a combination of sea level rise, the inevitability of ever more severe storms and storm surges — and its fateful, fatal geology and topology, which puts “more than $416 billion in assets at risk to storm-related flooding and sea-level rise”:

South Florida has two big problems. The first is its remarkably flat topography. Half the area that surrounds Miami is less than five feet above sea level. Its highest natural elevation, a limestone ridge that runs from Palm Beach to just south of the city, averages a scant 12 feet. With just three feet of sea-level rise, more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone; if the seas rise 12 feet, South Florida will be little more than an isolated archipelago surrounded by abandoned buildings and crumbling overpasses. And the waters won’t just come in from the east – because the region is so flat, rising seas will come in nearly as fast from the west too, through the Everglades.

Even worse, South Florida sits above a vast and porous limestone plateau. “Imagine Swiss cheese, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the rock under southern Florida looks like,” says Glenn Landers, a senior engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This means water moves around easily – it seeps into yards at high tide, bubbles up on golf courses, flows through underground caverns, corrodes building foundations from below. “Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here,” says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas.

Prudence dictates we plan for the plausible worst case. Coastal studies experts told the NY Times back in 2010, “For coastal management purposes, a [sea level] rise of 7 feet (2 meters) should be utilized for planning major infrastructure.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/23/2199031/scientist-miami-as-we-know-it-today-is-doomed-its-not-a-question-of-if-its-a-question-of-when/

[hobbit709]

1. And pretty much any place that's less than 100 ft above sea level.

[octoberlib]

2. Yep. Like Charleston, SC.

Or Norfolk, VA. I read an article that some Norfolk businesses were considering putting their buildings up on stilts because it's been flooding there so often.

[demwing]

4. do you expect the seas to rise up to 100 feet?

that's a huge change

[hobbit709]

5. They'll go much higher than that if the icecaps melt.

[NightWatcher]

3. So this is not a Marlins post?

Kidding aside.

Once sea levels rise we're all in trouble because of the population shift that will take place. Most of civilization lives in close proximity to the water and will be displaced once it occurs.

[geek tragedy]

6. Should never have removed the mangroves there in the first place. nt

[Eleanors38]

7. Ha! So they think they got rid of Stiltsville.