NASA's Interactive Flood Maps

First time accepted submitter jackandtoby writes "Whether you buy into global warming or not, you can have a go at being Charlton Heston and raise sea levels on a biblical scale thanks to NASA's online flood maps. Click away and cause your own Sim Flooding."

Comments

Re:Lex Luthor was on to something.

[girlintraining]

In Superman 1. I need to buy up all the real estate 20 miles inland and wait for Global warming to make me rich! Maybe I should set off some nukes at the north and south poles to help speed things up...

Forget that noise;
1. Buy large oil company.
2. Begin drilling wells off the coast of large city... at a 45 degree angle.
3. Frack baby, frack!
4. giant sinkhole swallows 20 miles of coastline.
5. PROFIT!

Not NASA

[ripler]

As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with NASA. It looks like a ploy to get better search rankings for firetree.net.

something something slashdot editors something.

I don't see how NASA's name got attached to this.

[mongoose(!no)]

It's based on their DEM (digital elevation model) dataset, specifically the Shuttle Radar Terrain Mapping project, but I doubt that they had anything to do with this. There's also an ad at the bottom for flood insurance. It also looks like the guy just went through and generated a blue overlay for land lower than the sea level rise you select, which wouldn't include any backwater effects from going up rivers. He's got a website about what he did here: http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/

5 years old, and not NASA

[eggstasy]

This website is 5 years old and has been covered on Slashdot before. It has nothing to do with NASA.
Altitude information was alledgedly taken from NASA, but you could well have done it with Google Maps API.
Or simply by superimposing a transparent blue layer on Google Earth at the altitude(s) of your choice.

Re:Why the hell is NASA...

[Goaway]

It was not actually done by NASA, and if it was, it would probably not have made a terribly big dent in their budget, seeing as how it was actually done by some guy just for fun.

Re:Where's the Waterworld Option

[jonadab]

Also, 1000 meters of ocean level rise wouldn't really be enough to give you a Waterworld scenario. It would be a global catastrophy, certainly, but there would still be quite a bit of dry land -- in large continuous strips, some which would extend for more than a quarter of the earth's circumference in length. Dry land would certainly not be so difficult to locate as to approach mythical status. A lot of Asia would still be above water (not just the Himalayas, either), plus a good portion of Africa, a sizable chunk of North America (just for example, Denver would still be more than half a kilometer above the new elevated ocean level), a long strip of South America running from Columbia all the way to Tiera Del Fuego, and quite a bit of Antarctica (yes, even with all the ice melted off), as well as various mountains and islands scatter around every geopolitical region in the world.