New Maps In A Warner World

The Sea Is Rising, and Familiar Coastlines Won’t Look the Same When You’re Your Parents’ Age.

- Corbie Hill

Let’s start out with a simple experiment.   Go to your kitchen sink and put about half an inch of hot water in a liquid measuring cup or a glass. Then get a single ice cube, drop it in, and see what happens. Everyone who tries this is will have varying water temperatures, naturally, so cubes will melt at different speeds. The result will be the same, though: eventually, you’ll end up with no ice and a higher water level. Ice in warm water melts even faster than ice left out in a warm room.

Now imagine that on a larger scale—in fact, we want you to imagine that on a worldwide scale—and you have a rough idea of what’s happening in the Earth’s oceans.

THE OCEAN TODAY

Ice once stored in glaciers or ice sheets is melting in places like Greenland and Antarctica. “Ice melt has begun because of a warm ocean and because of a warm atmosphere,” says Harold Wanless, chair of the Department of Geological Science at the University of Miami. “There’s no way to stop it, and it is accelerating.” United States government estimates put sea level rise at between 4.1 and 6.6 feet (1.2 and 2 m) by the end of the century. Wanless believes it could be closer to 15 or 30 feet (4.6 or 9.1 m). Melting ice is not the only reason that sea level will rise, shorelines will retreat, and islands will disappear, but it’s the easiest one to replicate in your kitchen.

The risk to low-lying islands and coastal areas is real. Many will be gone or on their way out by 2050. Take a look at a map of a familiar coast. It may not look like that at all when you’re grown up.

“How do you get the heat out of the ocean?” Wanless says. That’s what people call a rhetorical question—one that doesn’t have an answer. “We’re in for it, period.”