Echoes of Superstorm Sandy remain from Manhattan's once-flooded streets to Maryland's battered boardwalks to New Jersey's washed-away beaches.
No surprise. The Eastern Seaboard -- or any coastal region -- occasionally finds itself in the cross hairs of ferocious ocean storms. But it may have taken Sandy to drive home the threat scientists have been warning about for years: a rise in the sea level.
More of the same could lie ahead, suggest ocean scientists such as U.S. Geological Survey oceanographer Asbury Sallenger. The storm triggered the expected arguments about global warming's role, but that debate aside, the new constant for any storm is the increasingly important role likely to be played by sea level. In a study out Tuesday, climate scientists led by Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute report that since 1993 sea level has risen worldwide at a rate 60% higher than predictions. The findings appear in the Environmental Research Letters journal.
"Sea-level rise is accelerating along the East Coast," Sallenger says. "Every inch adds to the kind of inundation we saw in Sandy."
The real question, Sallenger and other ocean experts say, is what effect rising sea levels, which are accelerating along a "hotspot" stretching from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Maine, will have on storms hitting these places.
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=130007CMOC94
No comments:
Post a Comment