New York should be flooded with concern about global warming.
Scientists at NASA are using simulation technology from their Jet Propulsion Lab to predict what cities the ice caps will affect when they melt. Using New York, London and a few other port cities as examples, the simulation shows which Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets will affect 293 port cities across the globe over the course of the next century.
According to the demo, which was also published in the journal Science Advances, New York will be most affected by the ice on the northeastern half of Greenland. The tilt of the Earth as it spins around the sun shifts the water from the melting caps, so the water doesn’t trickle straight down. This means that, though the icy country is more than 3,000 miles from New York, water from Greenland but also, strangely enough, Antarctica, will affect New York more than other coastal cities that are closer like Halifax, Nova Scotia, closest to Greenland, or Lima, Peru.
In other parts of the world, London will be most affected by melting in northeastern Greenland and Sydney will be submerged by Antarctic ice that is actually farther away from Australia than the closer ice sheets.
“As cities and countries attempt to build plans to mitigate flooding, they have to be thinking about 100 years in the future and they want to assess risk in the same way that insurance companies do,” senior scientist Dr. Erik Ivinstold the BBC.
The project is meant to be used by coastal planners who can help these cities prepare for sea level rises as global warming increases the risk of coastal flooding. The calculations are adjustable for changing conditions.
As Dr. Eric Larour, the lead developer on the project explained to the Daily News, the key purpose of the simulation tool is to understand that the further away an ice sheet is, the more it could affect a city. “It’s very counterintuitive,” he said.
The tool is not a measure of when a city will be flooded, as there are many additional factors that will determine that, but rather where the ice will melt and where it will end up. While the simulation currently shows the contribution of ice in each city across 10, 50, 100, and 1,000 years, Larour says his NASA team is working with NASA sea level scientists to develop a more complete picture.
Previous NASA research has said that if Antarctic ice in the western portion of the continent were to melt, the world’s sea levels would rise four feet across the globe, but the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. would see rises of more than triple that estimate.
A time-lapse video also released by NASA released this week shows how Earth has changed over the last two decades, showing how much ice in Northern Europe and Canada has receded over the past 20 years.
