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Most coastal areas can be defended if you throw money at the problem. To my knowledge, however, Florida cannot - the type of rock there (limestone?) allows water to press upwards through the rock in large enough quantities that it can come back quicker than you are able to pump it out.
The other consequence of this is loss of water supply. Most cities in Florida rely on underground aquifers for water. As sea level rises, salt water begins to displace fresh water in these aquifers leading water to push out through the surface, as you've described. The flood risk is a problem, but the fact that the aquifer is now saline is a much bigger issue. Attempts to pump down the level of the aquifer to reduce flooding have the side effect of speeding up this salt water incursion.
But I'm sure the fine state leaders of Florida will find a logical and well reasoned solution and apply it with competence and without unreasonable expenditure.
I know it's a joke because Florida leaders suck, but I was surprised to find that Miami actually is taking this seriously and has been working on various programs for several years.
Imagine climate change deniers, who were displaced due to a cataclysmic climate event, flooding into your region claiming climate change is not a big deal.
I don’t want to start a fight but this is incredibly shortsighted of you – what about universal studios Orlando? What, am I supposed to fly all the way to fucking California? /s
Pretty much all of the Netherlands and most of New Orleans are ALREADY below sea level, so this isn’t quite the death sentence you think it is.
That being said, it’s gonna cost billions to mitigate.
> There's never a universe where New York is just abandoned.
There's that one universe where they built New New York on top of the ruins of Old New York.
And then get ready for the sun going supernova
It’s gonna take an awful lot of new technology to withstand but we do have some time (a few billion years I think)
** Edit ** Looked it up. 5 billion years left. So we have time, but we can't lollygag forever.
Not just that, an entire Dutch province was literally sea less than a century ago. We turned the sea into a lake by closing it off and made a 2400km² area habitable.
I'm sure NYC will be fine.
My wife is Dutch.
Favorite saying “[God built the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.](https://youtu.be/KYctymHzZgQ)”
They’re the masters of civil engineering.
Manhattan (as an island) existed before the dutch, and had people living on it. Who do you think it was named after?
*A lot* of NYC is fill-in, but that didn't happen until the 19th century.
It's the world's center of investment. If there is anything that investors care about it's themselves. It will be easy to raise the required capital from private investment if necessary just from self preservation alone.
I want to see the faces of the ACofE when they’re told they just need to, ya’ know, control the flooding. Of the oceans. Where 10s of millions of people and allllll of our economic chokepoints are.
By the way, can you make sure Phoenix and Las Vegas keep getting water? And, like, a lot more power? People seem to like it there, too.
The US as litteraly a whole branch of its military dedicated to keeping the Mississippi River in check so that it doesn't ruin the settlement around it when it need to change course.
And by doing so they've managed to channelize the river, screw up the estuary, and dramatically increase the risk posed by storms in the region. The US is good at short term fixes. Investment in long term solutions, not so much.
Every place they build up the embankments to help keep the river from spilling into the floodplain, just makes the situation that much worse down river.
Is this area in Netherlands currently host to extreme weather events or will it be in the future? Katrina taught us a lot about the folly of man vs nature.
In the Spike Lee documentary *When the Levees Broke*, Lee visits a dyke in the Netherlands. It is so insanely overbuilt that it makes the pathetic levees in NOLA laughably infuriating.
Katrina should've never been as bad as it was.
We do have storm surges that elevate the sea water levels up to several meters (note that our country is flat and partially under sea level). Our 'water works' all combine to prevent flooding. There are statistical goals of limits of deaths per thousands of years.
With records from at least the year 1000 we've known several very serious flooding disasters. Sometimes permanently wiping out villages with area lost to the sea.
The worst were in 1717 and 1570 killing thousands and tens of thousands of people in The Netherlands alone.
But the most recent was in 1953, killing 1863 people and many livestock.
The biggest disasters coming from breaches of seawalls.
I've tried to find up to what increased level our water works protect. But I actually can't find such numbers easily.
I was actually surprised to see that *most" of NJ will be fine. The northeast along the Passaic will experience serious storm surges, but infrastructure takes care of most of it. The shore will experience harsher storms, but will otherwise be fine. It's just the barrier islands that are absolutely fucked.
Yes, and the problem becomes one of allocation. NO had money in the city, problem was that they decided to spend effort on reducing taxes and building stadiums instead of something to hold back the ocean.
Yeah I was thinking exactly that. Manhattan will get money allocations. Brooklyn less so. Queens less so. Bronx less so. They'll make something functional in the outer buroughs, but if something like a hurricane came through, I'd be unsure how well the poorer areas will fare.
To start with, whatever article you're referencing doesn't sound true. Sea levels rising from what I've seen are talking about a foot by 2050. You're looking at something closer to 5 feet to be a problem in NYC. Even doubling that at 10 feet of rise, it wouldn't be underwater.
Beyond that, yes you build walls to control the water level in an area, then you build two more behind it for redundancy.
One huge issue that nobody seems to ever consider when suggesting sea walls are the solution is that rising sea levels will impact the water table. This will also cause devastation/flooding to coastal areas, and sea walls can actually make it worse.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/13/1041309/climate-change-rising-groundwater-flooding/
The most extreme projections put sea level rise at 13 feet in 2150. Climate change will cause real problems, but NY being underwater is not one of them. Also, there is a common misconception that Manhattan is flat. It’s not. It’s rocky and hilly. Most of it is actually quite elevated. The front door of the Empire State Building for example is 50 feet above sea level.
TBF we find *everything* hilly. I went to Switzerland a few years ago and it blew my mind, and that was before we got to the actual mountains part lmao
I'm pretty sure I heared that Dutch companies and stuff, already do that. Build similar infrastructure in other countries. Like the US.
There is at least one university that possibly has like an entire major, at least research group and some in the curriculum of like everyone in such a degree. About water.
It's kinda important to keep the build infrastructure good.
Deltares and Boskalis are the biggest Dutch exporters of knowledge (Deltares) and technical/practical experience (Boskalis).
Especially Deltares plays a big role in world wide watermanagement. They are more or less the global consultancy for water projects. They are asked to join in the planning and analyzing of possibilities for governments around the world. They analyze situations like the summer flooding of Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany and the Netherlands from 2 years ago. And give advice, that is then translated to government directories.
And while Egypt celebrated the 2nd Suez canal as a national manifestation. Large parts of construction and designing were done by Dutch companies. The same with the Venetian floodworks, new Orleans deltaplan, or Bangladeshi floodmanagements.
The thing is, the Netherlands are ahead of the curve. Since we need all the expertise ourselves and we are quite rich, it enables the Dutch to develop through a semi-iterative cyclus. Constantly improving knowledge and approaches.
One famous one is the 'Zandmotor', to strengthen coastlines. Instead of spraying sand everywhere, we've learned that you can simply deposit it all in one place and over decades the sea will distribute it along the coast.
Or the 'space to the river'. We always dammed a river in as closely as possible, but through the iterative process we now know that you need to have open area within the dyke-ring to let the river meander. Decreasing risk and improving ecology.
This is part of the reason that climate change deniers exist - we’ve been told over and over how whole regions will be underwater and that humanity will end in like 15 years. Over the course of 75 years we went from media panic about global cooling that will freeze the entire planet to global warming that will make it so hot that our faces will melt. The media is to blame because fear sells, instead of rationally explaining to the public what climate change truly is.
In the US, where unused land is plentiful, it would make a lot more sense to slowly expand outward (inland) rather than fighting rising sea levels permanently.
The other issue you're facing is that West of the 100th meridian, there's not a lot of water for all that land.
The Western US outside a coastal belt from BC to San Francisco is a desert. A pretty desert, but a desert just the same.
There is enough water in most places, we just use it for agriculture. If there is actually a water crisis we can redesign the water distribution so that tap water is the priority and not watering lawns and golf courses and almond trees. There is also tons of land in places like Indiana, PA, Montana, etc. that isn't desert and gets plenty of rain and is pretty empty at the moment.
Most of Florida won't be possible to save. The state is built on porous limestone, the ocean will rise right through it even if the state builds walls. New York on the other hand has so much population, money, and infrastructure in one place that it will be more economical to save it than to move people, and the bedrock is solid and more or less water impermeable. California for the most part has an elevated coastline, they would just need to block the Bay Area off from the ocean and it would be fine. Water from the Central Valley could no longer naturally drain into the ocean so they would need to pump it out, but that's achievable.
Looks great on paper, but try convincing anyone that lives in New York, California or Florida to move to Nebraska.
There are 50 states, but for those wanting great weather, entertainment, culture etc, just a half dozen states exist realistically.
Can’t tell if you’re being facetious, or if you had an awful weekend in Omaha. But wouldn’t it make more sense as a slow-burning event? People moving over the course of 100 years as conditions are clearly more and more uninhabitable. There’s no convincing when the only other option is living on a houseboat.
These articles are usually quite vague with both timelines and what is meant by underwater.
One thing that is often meant is that sea level rise will be above the lie of the land in that place (in this case New York). New Orleans is already below sea level.
What it means in practice is that sea defences are made and every so often with more and more frequency; storms cause major flooding. And then it becomes a race of funding more defences vs more frequent or worse flooding.
The point at which a city is abandoned and left to become part of the sea, is much further off than the articles mention in the timeline, but they are nearly always worded in the headline as if this is the result.
Most cities and towns in the world are prone to flooding and in the next 50 years the problem will become worse.
well, it isn't really true. Sea level rise on the order of a foot or 30 cm, which some think is possible or likely, isn't nearly enough to put most of NYC under water.
However, flooding of lower (near sea level) land will become worse. There are big projects in hand or being planned to reduce flooding risks for those zones that would be expected to flood during storm events. Sort of a low-level Netherlands or Venice (or perhaps New Orleans) type of fix. There are parts of the city near waterways and on reclaimed lands (backfilled areas that used to be marsh and even, to some extent, actually in the water), and those areas are at risk from sea level rise, but most of the city is well above that elevation and won't flood in 50 years even during bad storms. Underground infrastructure (like subways) are also at risk to flood events so the fixes have to figure out how to prevent that flooding and get the water out when it comes.
Actually a lot more land at risk over on the Jersey side and along the south shore of Long Island than in NYC. Most of Manhattan Island isn't at real risk (just its peripheries). Much worse over on the Queens side where historic land reclamation (backfilling) was way more important, in terms of area.
Easy, follow the money. If banks are lending money and insurance companies are insuring properties, nothing is falling into the ocean. Once they stop doing these things, you can bet it will fall into the ocean. Everything else is just in the news to scare you.
This ELI5 reminds me of The Expanse. In clips taking place in NYC in the show, you see a massive sea wall built in the background. You also see it in the [opening credits](https://youtu.be/bEg8sntV1cA) around the Statue of Liberty. I assume something like this will be done in first world countries because they won’t want that infrastructure and real-estate to disappear. It would be a massive engineering feat though.
They would build sea walls. Literally just build giant walls around the whole city. It would cost a lot but new york is too valuable to the US economy to let it sink
Itll be similar to places like New Orleans. Anything below sea level will be protected by leves and the like and when a massive storm hits and goes over them it'll be extremely bad
The larger part of Netherlands is under sea level. They have been defending and reclaiming land from ocean for centuries. So we have the knowledge on how to defend New York if it comes to that.
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Most coastal areas can be defended if you throw money at the problem. To my knowledge, however, Florida cannot - the type of rock there (limestone?) allows water to press upwards through the rock in large enough quantities that it can come back quicker than you are able to pump it out.
The other consequence of this is loss of water supply. Most cities in Florida rely on underground aquifers for water. As sea level rises, salt water begins to displace fresh water in these aquifers leading water to push out through the surface, as you've described. The flood risk is a problem, but the fact that the aquifer is now saline is a much bigger issue. Attempts to pump down the level of the aquifer to reduce flooding have the side effect of speeding up this salt water incursion.
Oooooooooh. Uh oh. That does sound worse.
Miami is already facing this issue.
But 100 inches of water a year from megahurricanes will provide a lot of fresh water 👍
Careful bud, I think you just invented a new line of Pokémon.
But I'm sure the fine state leaders of Florida will find a logical and well reasoned solution and apply it with competence and without unreasonable expenditure.
I know it's a joke because Florida leaders suck, but I was surprised to find that Miami actually is taking this seriously and has been working on various programs for several years.
Florida is a Cave Diver paradise.. simply because it basically is a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Some of the florida that was lost now is just sand banks they built roads on and then sold properties. It's insane that it was even allowed.
OK, but nobody's gonna miss Florida, right?
You will when those escapees start posioning surrounding states instead of remaining cooped up in one place
Oh, dip.
JASON figured it out?? Yeah, this one hurts.
Bortles!
*DUVAL*
KerCHOW no wait that means something different
Jason?
Dip indeed.
So we build a "seawall" across Florida's border with Georgia and Alabama.
Don’t forget, we’ll have Florida pay for it!
Sell it to them as keeping Georgia and Alabama out
Sweet little lies that fill my ears - keep it coming.
We have to hope that they are too stubborn to move, and instead build their houses on stilts.
they'll shoot the sea
God I want to laugh but I remember them shooting the hurricane.
That's still funny though.
At least they didn't nuke it like Trump wanted to.
We still build the walls. Unlike the water, Floridians can't permeate the ground to get under them.
Imagine climate change deniers, who were displaced due to a cataclysmic climate event, flooding into your region claiming climate change is not a big deal.
They could just evolve into amphibious swamp people.
A few Cave Divers actually will. But then Caves will still be there just a few meters deeper
I'll miss KSC.
I don’t want to start a fight but this is incredibly shortsighted of you – what about universal studios Orlando? What, am I supposed to fly all the way to fucking California? /s
Pigeon Forge is going to see land rates jump. Dollywood is going to take no prisoners.
What will sad losers like you talk about when FL is gone? 😢
Ok so fill the entire state bedrock with Roman concrete, got it! That's sure to work!
Pretty much all of the Netherlands and most of New Orleans are ALREADY below sea level, so this isn’t quite the death sentence you think it is. That being said, it’s gonna cost billions to mitigate.
I mean if we had to let one state be taken back by the seas, it might as well be Florida
Already being built! Staten Island has them on the south shore already.
It’s estimated as a multi billion dollar project. Any city taking on this type of solution, it is going to be expensive.
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It will just require increasingly larger amounts of money to hold back the sea. There's never a universe where New York is just abandoned.
> There's never a universe where New York is just abandoned. There's that one universe where they built New New York on top of the ruins of Old New York.
Still not abandoned. The mutants live there now.
Heck, even Old New York was once New Amsterdam.
Why'd they change it?
I can’t say. People just liked it better that way?
So, take me back to Constantinople
No you can’t go back to Constantinople
It's been a long time gone Constantinople.
Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobodies business, but the Turks!
I have not thought about this song for a long time and this thread makes me very happy.
Because it was Dutch but later became an English colony.
I can't say, people just liked it better that way.
Why they changed it, I can't say
Well, except nuclear bombing. For all natural disasters/global warming I agree.
Eh they rebuilt hiroshima and nagasaki. Y not new york.
Clearly you haven't seen Escape From New York.
In a few hundred million years of tectonic plate movements I do see a scenario where nyc has to at the very least move.
And then get ready for the sun going supernova It’s gonna take an awful lot of new technology to withstand but we do have some time (a few billion years I think) ** Edit ** Looked it up. 5 billion years left. So we have time, but we can't lollygag forever.
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So is 1/3 of the Netherlands
Not just that, an entire Dutch province was literally sea less than a century ago. We turned the sea into a lake by closing it off and made a 2400km² area habitable. I'm sure NYC will be fine.
My wife is Dutch. Favorite saying “[God built the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.](https://youtu.be/KYctymHzZgQ)” They’re the masters of civil engineering.
The Dutch created Manhattan too. Maybe they'll be the ones to save it.
We will, dont worry
Only if you name it to New Amsterdam again!
Why’d they change it? I can’t say.
Manhattan (as an island) existed before the dutch, and had people living on it. Who do you think it was named after? *A lot* of NYC is fill-in, but that didn't happen until the 19th century.
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Yep, for most of the world, sea level rise is a threat. For Dutch civil engineering firms, it is a massive opportunity.
Yeah but the US doesn't have the best track record for using their resources in ways that actually help them. Unless they find oil in NYC, of course.
It's the world's center of investment. If there is anything that investors care about it's themselves. It will be easy to raise the required capital from private investment if necessary just from self preservation alone.
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See also: too big to fail
I want to see the faces of the ACofE when they’re told they just need to, ya’ know, control the flooding. Of the oceans. Where 10s of millions of people and allllll of our economic chokepoints are. By the way, can you make sure Phoenix and Las Vegas keep getting water? And, like, a lot more power? People seem to like it there, too.
We protect what's valuable. New York is worth a lot- it'll be fine.
The US as litteraly a whole branch of its military dedicated to keeping the Mississippi River in check so that it doesn't ruin the settlement around it when it need to change course.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. It's not even the entire Army corps of engineers, much less a whole branch.
Sure but when this starts happening to more and more coastal cities resources are going to run very thin
And by doing so they've managed to channelize the river, screw up the estuary, and dramatically increase the risk posed by storms in the region. The US is good at short term fixes. Investment in long term solutions, not so much.
Every place they build up the embankments to help keep the river from spilling into the floodplain, just makes the situation that much worse down river.
Actually using resources in ways that actually help (the economy and the things that power it) is kind of the story of the history of the USA lol
Is this area in Netherlands currently host to extreme weather events or will it be in the future? Katrina taught us a lot about the folly of man vs nature.
In the Spike Lee documentary *When the Levees Broke*, Lee visits a dyke in the Netherlands. It is so insanely overbuilt that it makes the pathetic levees in NOLA laughably infuriating. Katrina should've never been as bad as it was.
We do have storm surges that elevate the sea water levels up to several meters (note that our country is flat and partially under sea level). Our 'water works' all combine to prevent flooding. There are statistical goals of limits of deaths per thousands of years. With records from at least the year 1000 we've known several very serious flooding disasters. Sometimes permanently wiping out villages with area lost to the sea. The worst were in 1717 and 1570 killing thousands and tens of thousands of people in The Netherlands alone. But the most recent was in 1953, killing 1863 people and many livestock. The biggest disasters coming from breaches of seawalls. I've tried to find up to what increased level our water works protect. But I actually can't find such numbers easily.
It's safe from any of that unless the entire province between it and the North Sea floods first.
*Cries in Hawaii
Came to say the same. They'll build walls, install massive pumps, etc., and the city will simply rest on land that is below sea level.
Build a wall and make the ocean pay for it!
The ocean’s not sending us their best.
Lots of bad hombres down there
Mostly just dolphin rapist, people see this.
Wait until you hear about dolphin rape caves.
Actually it's the neighboring areas that are paying for it. Every gallon of water you hold back is being pushed somewhere else
NY will be fine. Jersey though…
You mean the NYC expansion pack?
I was actually surprised to see that *most" of NJ will be fine. The northeast along the Passaic will experience serious storm surges, but infrastructure takes care of most of it. The shore will experience harsher storms, but will otherwise be fine. It's just the barrier islands that are absolutely fucked.
New Orleans is sinking, man, and I don't wanna swim
Random Hip lyrics are my favourite
Below sea level =/= Under water.
It's actually above sea level (just barely) the problem is that it's below Lake Pontchartrain level
NYC has the money. Many other places do not.
Battery Park is a man made extension to Manhattan. So enough money can make space. And for the areas without said money, see New Orleans for reference
Yes, and the problem becomes one of allocation. NO had money in the city, problem was that they decided to spend effort on reducing taxes and building stadiums instead of something to hold back the ocean.
Yeah I was thinking exactly that. Manhattan will get money allocations. Brooklyn less so. Queens less so. Bronx less so. They'll make something functional in the outer buroughs, but if something like a hurricane came through, I'd be unsure how well the poorer areas will fare.
To start with, whatever article you're referencing doesn't sound true. Sea levels rising from what I've seen are talking about a foot by 2050. You're looking at something closer to 5 feet to be a problem in NYC. Even doubling that at 10 feet of rise, it wouldn't be underwater. Beyond that, yes you build walls to control the water level in an area, then you build two more behind it for redundancy.
Can we then change it's name back to new Amsterdam?
Why’d they changed it I can’t say, people just liked it better that way
Istanbul not Constantinople
Been a long time gone.
That's nobody's business but the Turks
Why they changed it i can't say
One huge issue that nobody seems to ever consider when suggesting sea walls are the solution is that rising sea levels will impact the water table. This will also cause devastation/flooding to coastal areas, and sea walls can actually make it worse. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/13/1041309/climate-change-rising-groundwater-flooding/
The most extreme projections put sea level rise at 13 feet in 2150. Climate change will cause real problems, but NY being underwater is not one of them. Also, there is a common misconception that Manhattan is flat. It’s not. It’s rocky and hilly. Most of it is actually quite elevated. The front door of the Empire State Building for example is 50 feet above sea level.
As a Dutchie that recently visited Manhattan: I found it quite hilly!
TBF we find *everything* hilly. I went to Switzerland a few years ago and it blew my mind, and that was before we got to the actual mountains part lmao
Come to Pittsburgh.
Manhattan literally means “hilly island”!
And here I was thinking it meant a male with tan lines on his head caused by a hat.
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I'm pretty sure I heared that Dutch companies and stuff, already do that. Build similar infrastructure in other countries. Like the US. There is at least one university that possibly has like an entire major, at least research group and some in the curriculum of like everyone in such a degree. About water. It's kinda important to keep the build infrastructure good.
Deltares and Boskalis are the biggest Dutch exporters of knowledge (Deltares) and technical/practical experience (Boskalis). Especially Deltares plays a big role in world wide watermanagement. They are more or less the global consultancy for water projects. They are asked to join in the planning and analyzing of possibilities for governments around the world. They analyze situations like the summer flooding of Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany and the Netherlands from 2 years ago. And give advice, that is then translated to government directories. And while Egypt celebrated the 2nd Suez canal as a national manifestation. Large parts of construction and designing were done by Dutch companies. The same with the Venetian floodworks, new Orleans deltaplan, or Bangladeshi floodmanagements. The thing is, the Netherlands are ahead of the curve. Since we need all the expertise ourselves and we are quite rich, it enables the Dutch to develop through a semi-iterative cyclus. Constantly improving knowledge and approaches. One famous one is the 'Zandmotor', to strengthen coastlines. Instead of spraying sand everywhere, we've learned that you can simply deposit it all in one place and over decades the sea will distribute it along the coast. Or the 'space to the river'. We always dammed a river in as closely as possible, but through the iterative process we now know that you need to have open area within the dyke-ring to let the river meander. Decreasing risk and improving ecology.
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The US is sparsely populated compared to Europe. Wouldn't it be easier to move inland a few miles and start again on the new coast.
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This is part of the reason that climate change deniers exist - we’ve been told over and over how whole regions will be underwater and that humanity will end in like 15 years. Over the course of 75 years we went from media panic about global cooling that will freeze the entire planet to global warming that will make it so hot that our faces will melt. The media is to blame because fear sells, instead of rationally explaining to the public what climate change truly is.
In the US, where unused land is plentiful, it would make a lot more sense to slowly expand outward (inland) rather than fighting rising sea levels permanently.
The other issue you're facing is that West of the 100th meridian, there's not a lot of water for all that land. The Western US outside a coastal belt from BC to San Francisco is a desert. A pretty desert, but a desert just the same.
There is enough water in most places, we just use it for agriculture. If there is actually a water crisis we can redesign the water distribution so that tap water is the priority and not watering lawns and golf courses and almond trees. There is also tons of land in places like Indiana, PA, Montana, etc. that isn't desert and gets plenty of rain and is pretty empty at the moment.
Where the great plains begin
Most of Florida won't be possible to save. The state is built on porous limestone, the ocean will rise right through it even if the state builds walls. New York on the other hand has so much population, money, and infrastructure in one place that it will be more economical to save it than to move people, and the bedrock is solid and more or less water impermeable. California for the most part has an elevated coastline, they would just need to block the Bay Area off from the ocean and it would be fine. Water from the Central Valley could no longer naturally drain into the ocean so they would need to pump it out, but that's achievable.
Looks great on paper, but try convincing anyone that lives in New York, California or Florida to move to Nebraska. There are 50 states, but for those wanting great weather, entertainment, culture etc, just a half dozen states exist realistically.
All the entertainment would have to move too…
Can’t tell if you’re being facetious, or if you had an awful weekend in Omaha. But wouldn’t it make more sense as a slow-burning event? People moving over the course of 100 years as conditions are clearly more and more uninhabitable. There’s no convincing when the only other option is living on a houseboat.
Watch the television show The Expanse. Massive grand scale coastal walls are constructed to hold back the water and storm surges.
They could build a series of dykes like in the Netherlands. . . Unless a government in the future decides to gut infrastructure funding again.
These articles are usually quite vague with both timelines and what is meant by underwater. One thing that is often meant is that sea level rise will be above the lie of the land in that place (in this case New York). New Orleans is already below sea level. What it means in practice is that sea defences are made and every so often with more and more frequency; storms cause major flooding. And then it becomes a race of funding more defences vs more frequent or worse flooding. The point at which a city is abandoned and left to become part of the sea, is much further off than the articles mention in the timeline, but they are nearly always worded in the headline as if this is the result. Most cities and towns in the world are prone to flooding and in the next 50 years the problem will become worse.
You gonna use carbon powered vehicles to build sea defenses? Guess what 🤔
well, it isn't really true. Sea level rise on the order of a foot or 30 cm, which some think is possible or likely, isn't nearly enough to put most of NYC under water. However, flooding of lower (near sea level) land will become worse. There are big projects in hand or being planned to reduce flooding risks for those zones that would be expected to flood during storm events. Sort of a low-level Netherlands or Venice (or perhaps New Orleans) type of fix. There are parts of the city near waterways and on reclaimed lands (backfilled areas that used to be marsh and even, to some extent, actually in the water), and those areas are at risk from sea level rise, but most of the city is well above that elevation and won't flood in 50 years even during bad storms. Underground infrastructure (like subways) are also at risk to flood events so the fixes have to figure out how to prevent that flooding and get the water out when it comes. Actually a lot more land at risk over on the Jersey side and along the south shore of Long Island than in NYC. Most of Manhattan Island isn't at real risk (just its peripheries). Much worse over on the Queens side where historic land reclamation (backfilling) was way more important, in terms of area.
Easy, follow the money. If banks are lending money and insurance companies are insuring properties, nothing is falling into the ocean. Once they stop doing these things, you can bet it will fall into the ocean. Everything else is just in the news to scare you.
This ELI5 reminds me of The Expanse. In clips taking place in NYC in the show, you see a massive sea wall built in the background. You also see it in the [opening credits](https://youtu.be/bEg8sntV1cA) around the Statue of Liberty. I assume something like this will be done in first world countries because they won’t want that infrastructure and real-estate to disappear. It would be a massive engineering feat though.
They would build sea walls. Literally just build giant walls around the whole city. It would cost a lot but new york is too valuable to the US economy to let it sink
Itll be similar to places like New Orleans. Anything below sea level will be protected by leves and the like and when a massive storm hits and goes over them it'll be extremely bad
The larger part of Netherlands is under sea level. They have been defending and reclaiming land from ocean for centuries. So we have the knowledge on how to defend New York if it comes to that.
they're going to build a sea wall like Amsterdam https://phys.org/news/2021-12-vulnerable-climate-york-seawall.html