Sea Rise Could Force Millions In Florida To Adapt Or Flee (miamiherald.com)

mdsolar writes: For the first time, a team of researchers looked at ongoing population growth in areas where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has created flood maps that more accurately reflect local conditions. What they found was startling: projections that failed to factor in population growth in dense states like Florida hugely underestimated the number of people at risk and the cost of protecting them. Combined with the findings from a 2015 report, that means Florida can claim two titles: most property at risk, and now, most people.

Comments

Re:Let's all start running now!

[Anonymous Coward]

May I suggest you start talking to the Dutch. Their language sounds like a mix of German, English and a throat infection, but I assure you, they all understand and speak English excellently. The name "Netherlands" means "lower countries". You know that the Netherlands are famous for windmills, right? Well, those aren't all mills. Many are wind pumps, which were used to drain the land, most of which is below sea level.

Re:Let's all start running now!

[Sique]

Maybe I suggest you start talking to the Dutch either. I often hear that argument, but it means that you just use it as a talking point, but have never bothered to actually look at what the Dutch have there. First of all, the Dutch live at a coast that is very unique in that it has a large intertidal zone, a landscape so unique that there is no english word for it (while French, Dutch, German and Danish call it vasière, wad, Watt and vade resp.) It can stretch over several miles and falls dry every low tide and gets flooded every high tide. In this zone, waves wash new sand on the shore every high tide, so the land slowly grows into the sea. (It's different in Northern Germany and Danmark, where the tidal streams wash the sand away.) Thus, along the dutch shore new islands form all the time and grow.

In historical times already, the Dutch started building dams that got flooded every high tide, but kept the sand in the low tide, thus increasing the land grow at their coast. If the spot was high enough, they started building a dike on it to prevent even very high tides to get onto the freshly won land. After the dikes are ready and all remaining water has been pumped out, the land is called a polder. Most of the land at the Dutch coast is polderland. What we have here is a tradition of 1500 years of winning land by creating polders on former seabeds, helped by the unique feature of the large intertidal zones.

One problem still remains: Rivers flow into the sea, and if the land level is below sea level, they will not. At every river mouth, you have to somehow get the river water into the sea water, and if the sea level rises, you have to have pumps that are able to pump all the river water up into the seawater, or the river mouth will move up until it reaches the point where the sealevel matches the river level. At the Dutch coast, this problem is migitated by another natural phenomenom: A very high difference between high and low tide. While for most of the oceans, the difference (called tidal range) is just one or two feet (and thus much lower than the expected rise in sea levels), at the Dutch coast, the difference is between 6 and 10 feet. Thus, to let the river into the sea, but not the sea water into the land, you just close big gates at the river mouths every high tide, but open it at the low tide.

Florida borders directly at the Atlantic Ocean, and thus the tidal range is very low, which means that no Floridan river will flow into the ocean anymore if the sea level rises. If you build large dikes around Florida, it will not be flooded by ocean water, but the rain water and the ground water, which no longer can flow into the ocean, will flood Florida instead.