Drown Your City: What Extreme Sea Level Rise Would Look Like

One of biggest threats from global climate change is the rise of sea levels. Since most people around the world live in coastal cities, this is a big problem, since global warming would swamp most of the world's biggest population centers.

Lower Manhattan if the sea level rose by 262 feet  

Andrew David Thaler is a North Carolina marine biologist who runs the Southern Fried Science site

In it, he uses GIS modeling and Google Earth images of cities to show how badly they'd be underwater if sea levels rose by 80 meters, or about 262 feet.

That's the most extreme prediction of how much sea levels would rise if the world were continue to warm through the burning of fossil fuel.

So yes, these are worst case scenarios, but it's still interesting to see what would happen. Judging from the images, it's clear that even if we are to fall well short of the biggest sea level increases due to warming, we'd still be in big trouble.

Washington DC after a 262 foot sea level rise  

Images in this post are Thaler's renderings of what an 80 meter, or 262 foot rise in sea level would mean in selected cities.

The images are crudely rendered, but you can really see how under water some areas will get.

This assumes major ice sheets, like on Greenland, Antarctic and elsewhere melt.

Obviously, even if global warming is worse than even the most extreme predictions, sea level rises won't get this bad any time soon.

We won't see it in our lifetime, anyway.

However, though we won't see any apocalyptic views that are apparently in Thaler's work, any sea level rise due to global climate change would be bad.

San Franciso after an 80 foot sea level rise

Some scientists have said we've already "locked in" four feet of sea level rise through global warming and that will come in the next few decades. So any storm that comes along will flood coastal cities more than they do now.

That means a run of the mill storm that causes minor coastal flooding in cities now would cause massive destruction in the future if the same sized storm hit.  

And we don't need anything like last year's Hurricane Sandy again.