Underground, underwater

July 11, 2016 8:45 AM

In Zarrilli's view, there is no time to waste. By 2030 or so, the water in New York Harbor could be a foot higher than it is today. That may not sound like much, but New York does not have to become Atlantis to be incapacitated. Even with a foot or two of sea-level rise, streets will become impassable at high tide, snarling traffic. The cost of flood insurance will skyrocket, causing home prices in risky neighborhoods to decline. (Who wants to buy a house that will soon be underwater?) - Can New York City Be Saved In The Era Of Global Warming? - Rolling Stone.
posted by The Whelk (34 comments total)

On the bright side, I'll be able to finally buy a house
posted by thelonius at 8:56 AM on July 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

Building the $5.9 Billion Outer Harbor Gateway[PDF]!
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:02 AM on July 11, 2016

Another thing that could help protect the city is reseeding the harbor with oysters. The harbor was FILLED with oysters back in colonial days - some as big as salad plates. And that created a rough surface on the harbor floor which created drag on incoming storm surges and slowed them down.

But it also was a cheap food source, and so oysters were the food cart staple of the city in the 1700s and 1800s the way the hot dog is today. And by the 1930s we had eaten them all. That, plus the drag-net method used to fish them up, leveled out the harbor floor and that exacerbated the storm surges, as well as letting the pollution in the harbor get worse (oysters are really good at filtering water).

The "Billion Oyster Project" has been working to reseed the harbor with oysters for about ten years now, and there are some small, but encouraging, signs of progress.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:14 AM on July 11, 2016 [45 favorites]

Boston is already planning on parts of its metro area becoming an inundated city like Venice, and are bringing in experts on how to adjust infrastructure and building codes to accommodate a city of canals rather than roads.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:15 AM on July 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is what I've been telling friends and relatives in coastal GA, FL, AL and MS for years. Their houses don't have to be underwater for them to wind up a climate refugee. They can dodge every major storm, every tornado, every hurricane, forever: if the local infrastructure simply doesn't exist anymore and the local municipalities aren't looking to rebuild, they're still screwed. They're screwed in a nice house, but screwed nonetheless. There is an immediacy to certain climate problems that some people just don't want to acknowledge.
posted by eclectist at 9:20 AM on July 11, 2016 [10 favorites]

It is so intriguing to me that so few people are talking about the real options here and resort to "real estate value" instead.

1. I mean, the probability of a sea-level rise within our lifetimes is more than significant. It is not hard to imagine what this would mean, given that a large part of the world's population lives in coastal areas.
2. It will not be sustainable to live in flood zones, people will move inland. Yes, the whole of financial Manhattan will slowly move somewhere inland. To me, this is a fact, no matter how big the wall is going to be.
3. It would make sense to begin investing now in land near the future coastline.
4. Prepare for some major world unrest and shifting of populations (and the possible loss of that investment inland).

But no, it seems as though most people just want to carry on with business as usual, until the catastrophe hits, deaths will be in the millions, and cities will be destroyed. And a part of me thinks, that this is exactly what plenty of people secretly hope for.
posted by Laotic at 9:21 AM on July 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

One problem is that many reports in the US don't talk in terms of feet, but use the meters from the international reports. Translating that into feet seems like a trivial thing, but would help.
posted by idb at 9:26 AM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

The problem I see with getting people to move inland is that the sea would have to rise high enough and quickly enough to nudge people out of thinking about other tactics. At that point, moving could be more difficult.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:54 AM on July 11, 2016

This is what I've been telling friends and relatives in coastal GA, FL, AL and MS for years. Their houses don't have to be underwater for them to wind up a climate refugee. They can dodge every major storm, every tornado, every hurricane, forever: if the local infrastructure simply doesn't exist anymore and the local municipalities aren't looking to rebuild, they're still screwed. They're screwed in a nice house, but screwed nonetheless. There is an immediacy to certain climate problems that some people just don't want to acknowledge.

The leaders of these and other Southern states are really fucking their citizens over. At least New York is trying to make plans and prepare for the future.

Meanwhile in Florida state officials are banned from using "the term 'climate change' or 'global warming' in any official communications, emails, or reports".

And it's not just Florida: "In 2012, North Carolina passed legislation banning the state from basing coastal policies on the latest predictions of sea level rise... In 2012, Tennessee passed a law to allow teachers to present alternative theories to climate change and evolution, making it the second state, after Louisiana, to pass such a law."

In South Carolina a 2013 official report warning of major danger to the state from climate change was suppressed for political reasons.

Though to be fair it's not just the South, it's anywhere controlled by Republicans: last year the Wisconsin State Treasurer got a ban passed preventing a state agency overseeing state land "from engaging in global warming or climate change work while on BCPL time."

I feel sorry for the people who live in these places, because they're going to be screwed...on the other hand, they do keep electing these morons who keep screwing them.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:57 AM on July 11, 2016 [13 favorites]

It is so intriguing to me that so few people are talking about the real options here and resort to "real estate value" instead.

It might be necessary, even useful. I wonder if some hear "one foot of water" and think it can't be all that bad. But once a dollar value is placed on the damage, via increased taxes, insurance rates, etc. then that may get people's attention pretty quickly.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:04 AM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I don't know. Maybe if climate change starts directly affecting "real people" (e.g. the multibillionaires with their heads in the sand and their business ties in NYC) we might get some traction to actually do something about the CAUSE, rather than the symptoms...
posted by caution live frogs at 10:20 AM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Nope not going to happen according to:
Former President of Greenpeace Scientifically Rips Climate Change to Shreds
posted by robbyrobs at 10:20 AM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

It is so intriguing to me that so few people are talking about the real options here and resort to "real estate value" instead.

it's because real estate value is a far more easily understood metric than sea level rise to the majority of people in the affected areas, assuming they are not climate change scientists. i can easily look back over the past 20 years at how my rent has gone up and how rents in general have skyrocketed across the city, and how apartment buying prices are shockingly, terrifyingly different than they were 20 years ago, and apply that observation to future real estate cost predictions if a large area of rentable land is lost far better than i can envision which aspects of citywide infrastructure will be threatened by waters rising.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:24 AM on July 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

Boston is already planning on parts of its metro area becoming an inundated city like Venice, and are bringing in experts on how to adjust infrastructure and building codes to accommodate a city of canals rather than roads.

For those living near Morrissey Boulevard, this can't happen soon enough.
posted by Melismata at 10:31 AM on July 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Even with a foot or two of sea-level rise, streets will become impassable at high tide, snarling traffic.

In a city that depends so much on foot traffic, subways, and underground services like electricity, gas, water and sewer, I really think the difficulty of hailing a cab at high tide is going to be the least of anyone's concerns. If there's a foot of water in the streets even once a month, i think Manhattan is over. The world's tallest shantytown.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:48 AM on July 11, 2016 [6 favorites]

Maybe if climate change starts directly affecting "real people" (e.g. the multibillionaires with their heads in the sand and their business ties in NYC) we might get some traction to actually do something about the CAUSE, rather than the symptoms...

The problem is, by the time these symptoms start to become a problem to these people, it's already too late.

Our commitment to warming already means that if we cut all global CO2 emissions to zero TODAY, we're stuck with another 30 or 40 years of increasing climate change effects. And that's obviously not going to happen, cutting to zero today. So... yeah.

By the time the symptoms are a problem, it's way too late.
posted by hippybear at 10:53 AM on July 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

Plus people like that are probably as we speak making long-term plans to monetize these impending crisitunities.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:15 AM on July 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

I remember my uncle (scientist who worked on developing MRI in the early 80's) begin studying climate change in the mid-90's and in 2000 at christmastime was chastising anyone in my family who would vote for the Republican Party telling them with overt exasperation in his voice that we only had about 2-4 years before it would be too late to avoid bad outcomes.

this normally quiet guy was willing to get into fights over this on holiday and that was when I figured maybe there's something with all this climate change talk that I should care about.

Then bush shat on the Kyoto treaty a year or so later.

(Insert feelz here)
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:18 AM on July 11, 2016 [13 favorites]

In Miami they have a huge problem in that the rock the city is built on is porous. Maybe they can build dikes in NYC, but that won't save Miami. The rising sea level will seep up through the bedrock, flooding homes, contaminating freshwater sources, and backing up sewage lines.

It seems extreme to say that Miami might become a ghost town, people adapt and learn and change, but it'll take some very dramatic and very expensive changes for Miami to survive even a rise of 10cm.

But any coastal city is going to face very expensive problems even if it can be saved.

I expect one likely change will be simply people moving and building further inland in places that aren't quite as pancake flat as Florida. They elevated and moved entire city blocks when Chicago was plumbed for sewage pipes, something similar might work in some cities including NYC. As long as the bedrock is firm the shorter buildings could be lifted and the taller buildings might simply abandon the ground floor.

It'll cost trillions, but if the only other choice is abandoning a city, or even abandoning huge sections of a city, I don't see people choosing that.
posted by sotonohito at 11:20 AM on July 11, 2016

Can you defeat a 2-foot rise in sea level by constructing a 3-foot flood wall?

I've seen parts of Chicago where the "ground" level is actually lifted up one story, and there are underground roads and passages etc in there. Would doing something similar in NYC work?

Or is there something about higher water levels that create stronger storms, more energy, more devastation etc., that simply can't be solved by transporting Dutch engineers to New Amsterdam?
posted by rebent at 12:13 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

You can't wall off the city's entire 520-mile coastline, so how do you decide who gets to live behind the wall and who doesn't?

This sounds like the start of some dystopian scifi, like a more interesting exploration of the walled-off society theme in Attack on Titan (which I started watching but couldn't tolerate beyond a few episodes)

As I understand it, downtown Seattle was built just above the tideline, and managed to raise a significant portion of downtown up 10 feet or so early on in its existence to forestall major issues with plumbing backups and so on. It'll be interesting to see if such a scheme can be adapted to the 21st century. No matter what, we're in for a lot of displacement and unrest around the planet.
posted by Existential Dread at 12:17 PM on July 11, 2016

Gills.
posted by Theta States at 12:19 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

the taller buildings might simply abandon the ground floor.

I am not an architect, but, I feel safe in saying that a regular inundation of the bottom floors of of a tall building by corrosive seawater is going to make that building less and less safe over time. Not to mention that water, sewer and electrical lines go through there as well. You can't just "move up a few floors". Venice barely manages to build on top of buildings that sink, but it doesn't build skyscrapers. If the bottom rots on those, they fall over and shatter.

People really do not understand how destructive water is. This was made clear to me watching A.I., a movie with many sins, one in particular that had a New York of the far future frozen in glaciers but still standing. Glaciers don't work that way. They move. They grind things to dust, or expand and shatter them.
posted by emjaybee at 12:25 PM on July 11, 2016 [9 favorites]

Nope not going to happen according to:
Former President of Greenpeace Scientifically Rips Climate Change to Shreds

There is a lot of cuckoo-bongo in that gem of a link, but this is impressively misguided:

Beginning 540 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period many marine species of invertebrates evolved the ability to control calcification and to build armour plating to protect their soft bodies. Shellfish such as clams and snails, corals, coccolithofores (phytoplankton) and foraminifera (zooplankton) began to combine carbon dioxide with calcium and thus to remove carbon from the life cycle as the shells sank into sediments; 100,000,000 billion tons of carbonaceous sediment. It is ironic that life itself, by devising a protective suit of armour, determined its own eventual demise by continuously removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is carbon sequestration and storage writ large. These are the carbonaceous sediments that form the shale deposits from which we are fracking gas and oil today. And I add my support to those who say, “OK UK, get fracking”.

The past 150 million years has seen a steady drawing down of CO2 from the atmosphere. There are many components to this but what matters is the net effect, a removal on average of 37,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year for 150 million years. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90% during this period. This means that volcanic emissions of CO2 have been outweighed by the loss of carbon to calcium carbonate sediments on a multi-million year basis.

If this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive. If plants die all the animals, insects, and other invertebrates that depend on plants for their survival will also die.

How long will it be at the present level of CO2 depletion until most or all of life on Earth is threatened with extinction by lack of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Shorter summary: THEY'RE STEALING OUR PRECIOUS CO2, WE BETTER EMIT ALL WE CAN YO
posted by Existential Dread at 12:25 PM on July 11, 2016 [8 favorites]

When I saw Escape from New York way back when, and later looked at a map of NYC, I couldn't figure out why they didn't build the containment wall on the Manhattan shore; building it on the opposite shore all around it made it much larger. That Outer Harbor Gateway project makes the Manhattan Wall look modest in scope.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:51 PM on July 11, 2016

I've seen parts of Chicago where the "ground" level is actually lifted up one story, and there are underground roads and passages etc in there. Would doing something similar in NYC work?

Those buildings were built on floating foundations (suitable for Chicago's swampy origins). New York's buildings are on bedrock - there probably isn't a floating foundation that can be lifted.
posted by srboisvert at 12:52 PM on July 11, 2016

Not to mention the fact that New York works because it has an underground transportation system. The MTA is still digging out from under the mountain of Sandy repairs 4 years later. If that sort of flooding starts to happen regularly, the subway will simply cease to function.
posted by Automocar at 2:49 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

If the entire population America turned their backs on the Republican party in disgust, and only elected pro-environment Democrats to every last elected office in America, it might not make much of a difference. The pro-environment Democrats would still need the money, the power, and most importantly, some kind of consensus around which massive infrastructure projects to throw the government's weight and treasure behind -- I mean, you're only going to get one chance with some of these things. The battles over which project to try where could be brutal. And is it worth it to put up such a massive fight against mother nature? Isn't that the conservative way? Better to plan a gradual pullback. Accommodate. Yes, and surrender.
posted by Modest House at 4:20 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

> As I understand it, downtown Seattle was built just above the tideline, and managed to raise a significant portion of downtown up 10 feet or so early on in its existence to forestall major issues with plumbing backups and so on.

Yeah, but Seattle was teensy-tiny back then — it was a frontier boomtown, not something in any way comparable to NYC.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:31 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

The pro-environment Democrats would still need the money, the power, and most importantly, some kind of consensus around which massive infrastructure projects to throw the government's weight and treasure behind -- I mean, you're only going to get one chance with some of these things.

Money is pretty cheap. Might be a good time to finance new infrastructure.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 6:09 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Most places I would be inclined to say, "Surrender to Mother Nature," but as the article mentioned, New York is better situated than most coastal cities, what with the bedrock. Nothing will save Miami, but it is possible to save New York. And the fact that the mayor and governor are both aware of the problem is just - I'm so incredibly happy that this conversation is happening. I'm so stoked about this article.

I like this solution: Susannah Drake proposed elevating the Lower Manhattan coastline to the original 1650 contours, then waterproofing utilities in vaults under the sidewalks, raising and redesigning streets to allow them to hold water during floods, and transforming the waterfront of Lower Manhattan with salt marshes and wetlands absorbing wave energy. Because that can all be landfill, I think. It doesn't need to be real solid land, it just needs to be there. So they can just ... take the landfills they were going to build anyway, and expand Brooklyn and Staten Island south.

Those buildings were built on floating foundations (suitable for Chicago's swampy origins). New York's buildings are on bedrock - there probably isn't a floating foundation that can be lifted.

I mean, I'm pretty sure the smaller buildings are normal floating foundations, but more importantly, they built new foundation walls when they elevated Chicago. I'm not an architect, but I'm guessing you could ... pour in more foundation.

More important would be elevating the streets, which they also did in Chicago.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 8:24 PM on July 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

The two-level streets in Chicago were built to accommodate bridges over the Chicago River. Rather than have a bridge deck rising above the street and building entrances, they made the bridge deck the new street level. Note how the flat streets start to pitch uphill a block from the river. It's impressively seamless.

They didn't raise buildings to accomplish this, and the lower levels aren't exposed to water, or even really underground. They're on basically flat ground beneath a sloping bridge deck.

Chicago did also raise buildings early in its history to accommodate building a sewer system, and it did involve building new, higher foundation walls in place. However that was generally like 4 feet of height difference, and the surrounding streets would have been built up with landfill and re-graded.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 12:53 AM on July 14, 2016

Radio New Zealand's Insight yesterday: Fighting the Pacific's Rising Seas
posted by XMLicious at 3:06 AM on July 18, 2016

'The best solution? Move the Mauritanian capital': water on the rise in Nouakchott
posted by XMLicious at 9:07 AM on July 25, 2016