When you look at the world's population density map, you might notice a trend.
40% of the world's population lives within 100 kilometers of a coast.
Most of those people
are living in and around large cities and these dense urban areas are
growing.
That growth calls for more manufacturing, transportation, power plants,
and electrical grids.
Resources like this are often placed in cheaper,
low elevation land. Which means that for many coastal communities, sea level rise
caused by climate change isn't just a problem for the future.
It's a problem
right now.
One of these places is the New Jersey Meadowlands.
It's a 30 mile
stretch of small towns built on marshlands.
As the land here sinks and sea
levels rise, some communities will begin to flood.
Once impacts become noticeable
such as water on low-lying streets, water coming in below seawalls.
Once that becomes noticeable and problematic it's going to become chronic
rather quickly.
So how do we know that sea level is rising?
Oxon isotopes.
The Gulf Stream.
Bathemetry.
We have several sources of evidence.
Scientists like these guys use a variety of records to study sea-level change.
The longest record where people have been observing sea-level rise directly is
with instruments called "tide gauges."
These instruments measure the level of water
as it goes up and down with the tide.
Using these gauges alongside geological
records and satellites, scientists have recorded an acceleration in sea level
which they expect to continue through this century.
Between 2000 and 2050 we're
probably looking at a range here in New Jersey of about 1 to 2 feet of sea level rise.
It's going to impact low-lying infrastructure in particular.
Imagine if
you're on a train and you had to wait for high tide to go out before the train
could go through
and what a disruption to the system that would be.
And then multiply that by every other train line or roadway
that goes at sea level.
The Meadowlands is six miles away from
New York City's Times Square.
It's one of the busiest transit corridors in the United States.
If you draw a line from Philadelphia to New York City and/or
Philadelphia to Boston, you basically have to go through the Meadowlands.
So as a result, all of the infrastructure that connects this region together
bottlenecks down, comes together in the Meadowlands.
By year 2050 researchers
estimate that 115 rail stations here would flood on a chronic basis.
And by that time
nearly 60% of the region's current power generating capacity would
be in a floodplain.
If you think back to Superstorm Sandy and one of the
iconic images of that storm was all of lower Manhattan in darkness.
It's not
just an inconvenience in a home losing power, we could shut down the entire
Northeast if we lost power.
Hurricane Sandy was and is a historic storm.
Scientists recorded tides up to 20 feet higher than usual along the New Jersey
and New York coastlines.
It was the second costliest storm on
record in the United States and the tunnels that carry hundreds of thousands
of commuters every day still need repair.
But with a rising sea level flooding
will get worse during weather events that aren't nearly as extreme as
Hurricane Sandy.
The simple thing to understand is that with a higher sea
level it requires less of a storm to produce the same amount of flooding and
the same storm will produce more flooding.
And in other parts of New Jersey
there have been documented nuisance flooding events.
Those can happen even when it doesn't rain. Oftentimes the water will come from the
ocean or river spilling its banks.
Not so much rainfall flooding. On America's
eastern coast tides cycle four times a day from high to low to high to low, but
at certain points of the year they can rise much higher than usual.
We're at a
point now with continued sea level rise, that the high tides of the year often
times called king tides with maybe a little extra wind behind them, they
become a problem and actually start to flood communities.
According to NOAA, the annual
number of high tide flood days is projected to increase fastest in
New York City. And in a few decades, coastal cities on the Atlantic could experience
high tide flooding as often as three times a week.
Storm flooding like what
Hurricane Sandy brought, could become more persistent very soon.
By the end of
the century, many towns in New Jersey would find themselves underwater
frequently. Including this town in the heart of the Meadowlands.
One report
suggested it would lose all of its housing to chronic flooding.
The response
to sea level rise boils down to three options: prevention
is basically building higher sea walls.
Things like berms.
Adaptation is elevation.
Some critical infrastructure can't relocate for economic reasons, so
it would just end up being cheaper to raise them.
Retreat is basically
returning the land to nature, but the state of New Jersey doesn't seem keen on that.
In the last decade, a new NFL stadium was built alongside large swaths
of new housing and there's an airport expansion plan.
But all of that new
concrete could increase flooding from storm water runoff.
The Meadowlands is
one of the biggest sponges in our region. If we get rid of those wetlands or if we
you know pave them over, we're going to be pushing water into other places.
It's very hard to find any community that's looking at sea-level rise as a
threat that they're planning for today.
Even if this is something that's 20
years away or so, the decisions we make today last into those 20 years and beyond
and we need to be doing more to prepare for those.
Sea level rise impacts are
happening now.
We're seeing them in the East Coast in terms of increased number
of these sunny day flooding events.
As sea levels continue to rise impacts
and become deeper, more severe, more widespread and we're going to have to
come to grips with the fact that the way that we live our lives today is not
going to be the way that we live our lives in the future.
Yo! Thank you for watching.
If you liked that video you're going to love what the Verge Science
team is making on their Youtube Channel.
You can check out one of their
new videos right here.
Again, thanks for watching and I'll see you soon.