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New York Under Water

nautil.us

37 pointssergeant318 comments

This is a science fiction story about a world in which the sea level has risen "more than 50 feet" (15m) in 2140. This is a reasonable conceit for a story, but, it's important to not update our beliefs about the real world based on fictional evidence.

Eyeballing a graph in the IPCC climate change report, the worst-case scenario for sea level rise by 2200 has a wide error bar, but it's from .6m-2m; the average-case scenario is from .3m-1.1m. Reduce those numbers further for a setting in 2140, and this is not enough to flood New York as described. https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Cha... pg 1188.

Isn't the vast majority of the flooding danger due to climate change during storms anyway?

I heard a radio programme once about nature-vs-nuture and they were using the fictional novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, to sort of present evidence and discuss the subject, and all the way through I was thinking 'but this novel is just what someone sat and made up based on imagination...'

I have a suspicion that the approach that will be used is the Dutch approach and a Dam will be built across the Block Island Sound enabling reclamation of significant amounts of land. The value of NYC and the ability to expand the city should make it worth while.

I suspect dams will be used to protect Miami which already suffers from sea flooding.

My understanding of the hydrology around Miami is that dams won't work. Water will just seep through the ground.

Miami also has a huge amount of rain, as well as tropical storms.

I'm actually really intrigued, somewhat enamored even, by this idea. The newly-created land seems like it would be astronomically valuable, and so the value proposition is surprisingly interesting to me. Brings a lot of questions to mind --

Are there any comparable projects, of such massive scale (or even somewhat close), to compare to? Especially on cost?

Does the sudden influx of that much land not cause existing land value to plummet, or is there an established way to ration it into the market to help mitigate that? Is this something that could even happen politically, or would entrenched interests / existing land owners prefer to create canals (not sure if realistic, but curious) which would probably reduce the property inventory & in theory increase value?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works

It doesn't answer all your questions, especially since economists have noticed that the US has trouble keeping large public works on budget, but it's the obvious project to look at.

Chicago expanded their shoreline via landfill from 1870-1940. Not sure about cost / land value.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3713.html

https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/cdot/Sh...

A modern article says an additional 225 acres could add $62.5B.

https://chicago.curbed.com/2015/1/21/10001048/we-could-keep-...

Also, somewhat related, Chicago raised their city 6 ft in the 1850-1860's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Here's a theoretical larger project, as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa

Miami is basically screwed when it comes to rising sea levels.

Florida is not a very high state, to start with. The Everglades are basically a 60-mile wide river because there's insufficient height to actually channelize them. If the sea level rises around 5-7m, Miami starts flooding from the western direction as well. Protecting Miami would mean building an island in a shallow sea, not enclosing a bay.

The other problem is that South Florida is built on a very porous bedrock, so there is significant underground hydrology. The sea is largely kept out by the pressure of Lake Okeechobee and related hydrological systems pushing against the salt water intrusion. Even if you built up the land in Miami itself, as the rest of Florida floods, the sea starts making better inroads and Miami floods from underneath.

5-6m of sea level rise is so far in the future we'll observe it from our floating cities powered by harvested zero-point energy.

What to do about the Hudson though?

The hardest thing to believe in NEW YORK 2140 is that the stats language R is still in active use 120 years in the future.

Right? All the core models are going to be FORTRAN2110 because later editions weren't widely adopted.

All the core models? Are you forgetting the critical ones baked in PyCOBOL 3.8 (circa 2084)?

There's always the possibility that an array of dams and locks could be established, to preserve New York harbor, as it exists.

It'd be expensive, but New York is already expensive. Would such a project consume more concrete than other dams?

When I was about 12, I was in a academic play in which I had to recite a portion of the quote on the statue of liberty by Emma Lazarus:

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I was very impressed by this thought.

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