Chilling Map Shows Boston With A 7.5-Foot Coastal Flood
City planners are grappling with many of the threats and possibilities for mitigating them, from streets that can double as canals to underground cisterns and floating buildings.
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Boston, Massachusetts.
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Flooding from sea level rise is threatening to wash away many of Boston’s historical buildings and archaeological sites, according to WGBH News.
In 2012, the city was spared when Hurricane Sandy turned west and slammed into New York instead. But the close call sparked a May conference of experts and stakeholders to consider what would have happened if Sandy had hit Boston. What they discovered was that historic sites like Faneuil Hall and the Blackstone Block of colonial streets — which sit within the city’s 100-year tidal flood zone — would already have been flooded three times since Sandy if storms had hit during high tide instead of low. A May report by the Union of Concerned Scientists noted both sites as some of the most at-risk in the entire country thanks to increased flooding from climate change and sea level rise.
The group also reported that since 1921, Boston has 20 instances of high tides with waves 3.5 feet taller than normal. Half of those instances hit within the last decade.
“When you start thinking about where the ocean is going to come in and how big the ocean is, and you start thinking about how the water will flow, you realize that these beautiful old buildings are right at the forefront of this issue,” said Boston Environment Commissioner Nancy Girard.
The Boston Harbor Association, which provided the May conference with many of its numbers, also released a report with an interactive map that tracks flooding in the city according to 5-foot and 7.5 foot coastal floods.
Nor does the problem end with the historic sites themselves; the ground under Faneuil Hall was once a wharf that was filled in with trash and covered with dirt to extend the land. That buried garbage is now an archaeological goldmine providing insight into life in 1700s Boston. Now it’s in danger of being covered by water. Boston’s city archaeologist Joe Bagely told WGBH News that at least 100 other lesser-known archaeological sites across Boston are also in danger of being washed away, including troves of Native American artifacts out on the Boston Harbor islands.
A Boston symposium in April, co-hosted by Sasaki Associates and Boston Architectural College, addressed many of the same issues. The gathering occurred in conjunction with a museum exhibit that produced a similar interactive map, and focused on the need to address sea level rise and flooding as a risk management issue, especially over the longer time scales faced by property owners and their insurers. (Property developers, by contrast, tend to get their money back over a relatively short period and move on to the next project.) That means building infrastructure in anticipation of storms that will hit once every 100 years or even once every 1,000 years.
Elizabeth S. Padjen over at Landscape Architecture Magazine reported that the symposium addressed ideas ranging from rebuilding certain streets and alleys to function as ad hoc canals when the floods come — an idea also considered by the May conference — to underground cisterns, foldable parks, floating buildings and absorbent streets.
Nor does the threat of floods in Boston come solely from the ocean. According to the National Climate Assessment, the northeast of the country is one area where climate change is likely to significantly increase precipitation. The area has already seen a 71 percent rise since 1958.
Along with New York City and Philadelphia, Boston also has some of the oldest water infrastructure ion the country. As a result, the city’s stormwater and wastewater is all still handled by the same pipe network, meaning downpours threaten the city’s health with backed up sewage as well as with the damage from flooding.
A 2013 study in Nature ranked Boston the eighth most at-risk for flooding of all the country’s major coastal metropolitan areas, facing $237 million worth of possible damage.
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Planet’s Hottest June On Record Follows Hottest May
NOAA reports that the warmest May on record has been followed by the hottest June on record. In fact, the last time the Earth experienced a June with below-average global temperatures, Gerald Ford was President!
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Last month was the warmest June since records began being kept in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported Monday. That follows the warmest May on record.
Land and sea surface temperature percentiles in June 2014. Hot spots in red.
CREDIT: NOAA
As the map shows, the oceans were particularly warm. In fact, NOAA reports:
The June global sea surface temperature was 0.64°C (1.15°F) above the 20th century average of 16.4°C (61.5°F), the highest for June on record and the highest departure from average for any month.
Another worrisome piece of news from NOAA: “Parts of Greenland were record warm during June. According to the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Kangerlussuaq in southwestern Greenland recorded its record highest maximum June temperature of 23.2°C (73.8°F) on June 15.” If we don’t reverse emissions trends ASAP, then it’s a question of when, not if, the Greenland ice sheet passes the point of no return for catastrophic, irreversible melt.
NOAA’s report matches that of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) which said that last month was the hottest June on record. They had previously reported it was the hottest May on record. NASA has reported it was the third warmest June on record in their dataset, but the hottest May on record.
These records all occurred despite the fact we’re still waiting for the start of El Niño. It is usually the combination of the underlying long-term warming trend and the regional El Niño warming pattern that leads to new global temperature records.
According to NOAA, “The last below-average global temperature for June was June 1976 and the last below-average global temperature for any month was February 1985.” In other words, the last time the Earth experienced a June with below-average global temperatures, Gerald Ford was President!
As an aside, if you are wondering why temperatures declined from 1880 to 1912, a primary reason was an an unusual spate of major volcanic eruptions from 1875 to 1912, including the 1883 Krakatau eruption, which was the biggest volcanic explosion ever observed. Climate and volcano expert Alan Robock discusses the cooling effect from big volcanoes here. It was not until the 1963 Agung eruption, which “produced the largest stratospheric dust veil in more than 50 years” in the Northern Hemisphere, that major volcanic activity resumed.
So, barring a major volcanic eruption in the near future, It seems all but certain more records will be broken in the coming months, as global warming combines with an emerging El Niño — whose chance of forming NOAA puts at “about 70% during the Northern Hemisphere summer” and “close to 80% during the fall and early winter.”
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