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Could we really see sunken cities in a hundred years?

Writer's picture: Connie LacyConnie Lacy

My novel, The Shade Ring, is set a hundred years in the future when sea level has risen fifteen feet. Of course, it's fiction. But scientists do agree sea level is rising. The big question is: how fast?

These days it's easy to Google "sea level rise" and come up with all kinds of animations on how coastlines would disappear with, say, 3 feet of sea level rise, 10 feet or, heaven forbid, 200 feet. You can also find documentaries on climate change and stories about how fast polar ice is melting. One recent story in National Geographic focused specifically on south Florida. Officials there are already figuring out how to handle the constant flooding and what they're going to do as the ocean increasingly flows through the streets.

Here's a snippet from the NG article: "The oceans could rise two feet by 2060, according to the National Climate Assessment, as their waters warm and expand and as the Greenland and polar ice sheets melt. By 2100 seas could rise as much as 6.6 feet. That would put much of Miami-Dade underwater. For every foot the seas rise, the shoreline would move inland 500 to 2,000 feet."

Here's one of those sea level animations I mentioned: http://cegis.usgs.gov/video/30m/FloridaSLR.swf

I don't know how this will play out but I'm advising my sons not to move to Florida.

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