One estimate suggests 2.5m coastal properties in America could be at risk of flooding every fortnight by 2100
-frame: a recumbent, two-dimensional Eiffel Tower. Pin a pivot through its tip, so it can swivel around 90 degrees. Then add to its splayed feet something like the rocker of a rocking chair, but 210 metres long, 22 metres high and 15 metres wide. Now double it: picture, across a 360-metre-wide canal, its mirror image. Paint all their 13,500 tonnes of steel glistening white.
A massive problem for some; an existential risk for others. Atoll nations like Kiribati—average elevation less than two metres—risk losing almost all their territory to floods like that pictured on the previous page. In 2015 the president of Micronesia, another Pacific island state, described the fate of such nations in the global greenhouse as “potential genocide”. This, one hopes, goes too far; refugees could surely be resettled.
The West Antarctic ice sheet looks, in profile, like a flying saucer that has landed on the sea-floor. A thin rim—an ice shelf—floats on the sea. A thicker main body sits on solid rock well below sea level. As long as the saucer is heavy enough, this arrangement is stable. If the ice thins, though—either through surface melting or through a faster flow of glaciers—buoyancy will cause the now-less-burdened saucer to start lifting itself off the rock.
If you remove enough stuff from the sediments below you, the surface on which you stand will settle. In the first half of the 20th century Tokyo sank by four metres as Tokyoites not yet hooked up to mains water drained aquifers. Parts of Jakarta are now sinking by 25cm a year, as residents and authorities of Indonesia’s capital repeat Japan’s mistakes.
In October 2012 Hurricane Sandy jolted the city into a new awareness of the threats it faces, given that geology, gravity and the Gulf Stream are conspiring to raise the seas lapping at its shores by half as much again as the global average. Other cities are worrying, too. Rotterdam now welcomes 70 delegations a year from fact-finders seeking to apply Dutch know-how to New Jersey, Jakarta and points in between.A lot of effort is devoted to engineering a way out of the problem.
As welcome as these ideas are, they remain niche. Rebuild by Design’s $1bn is a drop in the bucket compared with the $60bn which Congress earmarked for post-Sandy recovery efforts. Some of that money was spent sensibly, for example on hardening power stations and hospitals. A lot was used to replace storm-lost buildings with new ones built in the same way and much the same place.
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