Cities along the Gulf Coast are bracing for 10 to 12 inches of sea level rise by 2050, and data from a study in the journal Nature last week showed those risks will be exacerbated as urban areas sink to meet the sea.
Researchers from Virginia Tech, Brown University and other institutions mapped the impacts of sea level rise and coastal subsidence, or the sinking of land near the ocean, and found that land sinking would exacerbate sea level rise in some urban areas along the Gulf to a greater degree than other cities in the 32-municipality study.
The study projected that between 2020 and 2050, subsidence would account for about a fifth to a third of the new land below sea level in the urban areas analyzed on the Gulf Coast, compared to just over a tenth on the Atlantic coast and about 5% on the Pacific.
“As sea level rises and land subsides, the hazards associated with climate extremes (for example, hurricanes and storm surges), shoreline erosion and inundation of low-lying coastal areas grow,” the study said.
The authors identified each coastal city’s risk of storm damage using localized data on flooding and calculating how much each segment of land had been subsiding. Sinking ground is found most often in urban areas with clay-like soil where groundwater and oil extraction irreparably compact the earth.
“A lot of the coastal areas that we have around the U.S. are made up of young sediment, the latest geological materials to be deposited on land,” said Leonard Ohenhen, a coastal resilience expert at Virginia Tech and the study’s lead author. “They are easily compressible, and that… compaction leads to subsidence.”
His team’s paper also honed in on the potential costs of high tide flooding for five Texas cities: Port Arthur, Galveston, Texas City, Freeport and Corpus Christi.
The analysis found that across the five coastal Texas cities in the study, thousands more homes and tens of thousands more residents could be exposed by mid-century to flood devastation following the combination of sea level rise and sinking land.
You can read the paper here. The authors do say that we’re a lot better at disaster preparedness now, which will mitigate the overall impact, so we’ve got that going for us. Look, there is a lot being done to try to minimize the effects of climate change, and there is also a lot being done to resist those efforts. Maybe taking a few of the leaders of that wretched resistance and burying them up to their heads in the sand in places like Port Arthur and Galveston might help a bit. I’m just thinking out loud here.