Rising Seas: Submerged Cities

The article Rising Seas: How They Change Our Coastlines from National Geographic Magazine addresses the growing issue of the rising of sea levels due to global warming. We saw last year during hurricane Sandy the devastation that flood waters and strong currents can bring upon coastal communities. Well, this may be a glimpse into the future due to the growing heat of our planet. The sea level didn’t change that much for almost 2,000 years, the real change started in the 19^th century when the earth began to get warmer. We have begun to slowly alter our planet with fossil fuels and flooding like seen during Sandy could become less unusual for coastal areas. As a result of releasing CO² and other fossil fuels into the atmosphere we have raised the Earth’s average temperature more than one degree and the sea level 8 inches over the past century. What we have done cannot be reversed, even if everyone in the world stops burning fossil fuels now, the existing gases would heat up the Earth for centuries to come. In May, the concentration of CO² in the atmosphere was at 400 parts per million, which is the highest since about 3 million years ago. Global warming influences the sea level in two ways. One is thermal expansion, water grows in volume as it heats up, and the second is that the ice on land is slowly melting. Primarily mountain glaciers have been melting so far, but scientists are concerned about the giant ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Scientists have determined that both Greenland and Antarctica together have lose about 200 billion metric tons of ice annually, which could cause the sea level to rise about 3 feet by 2100. “In the last several years we’ve observed accelerated melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica,” says Radley Horton, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York City. “The concern is that if the acceleration continues, by the time we get to the end of the 21^st century, we could see sea-level rise as much as six feet globally instead of two to three feet.” If we were to melt all the 5 million cubic miles of ice on Earth, which would probably take more than 5,000 years, the sea level would be raised about 216 feet, the average temperature on earth would be about 80 degrees, and deserts would expand greatly. Many coastal cities could be under water such as Boston, New York, London, Venice, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and just about the entire state of Florida.

               I, as many others do, see this as a big problem. We may think that this isn’t going to affect us because all of this is going to happen in 5,000 years and we will all be dead. But, it will affect us now. Sea levels have already started to rise and the temperature has already begun to increase. We learned in biology that CO² can’t be created and can’t be taken away, it just changes form. Right now, we are burning fossil fuels at an alarming rate and unnaturally increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We can’t reverse what we have already done, but we can put an end to the fossil fuel burning. If we find alternative sources of energy, we can stop this problem from getting even worse. We all want our future generations to live in a cool, green planet instead of a dry, hot one.