In New York, floods will occur every 25 years

Scientists from the United States analyzed climate change and sea level rise indicators and came to a disappointing conclusion: the American coast will soon be flooded enough in the near future.

For example, New York and New Jersey neighborhoods are in danger - major flooding will occur there every 25 years, according to a journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Benjamin Horton of Rutgers University in New Brunswick and his colleagues studied how sea levels have changed over the past two millennia around New York and New Jersey. They compared these figures with how the level of hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean has fluctuated over the last thousand years.

Scientists were able to restore the history of fluctuations in sea level due to excavations in the southern part of New Jersey. There were found deposits of single-celled marine algae, falling ashore along with ebbs and flows. With the help of these findings, scientists have prepared a computer model of the climate of New York and its environs.

As shown by calculations, in the pre-industrial era, powerful storms capable of temporarily covering coastal regions with a layer of water 2-2,5 meters in thickness rarely appeared off the coast of New York and New Jersey — about every five hundred years. In the past fifty years, the situation has changed dramatically: now such floods can occur once in 25 years, the article says.

The main reason for the fact that there will be more storms in the future is the rise in sea level due to global warming. This is almost a half meter increases the minimum mark on which rise the waters of the Atlantic at the onset of a storm. In this regard, the storms will flood large areas compared to a period of four hundred years ago.

Horton and his colleagues believe that the authorities of the cities and the adjacent territories of the states should take this threat seriously and begin to take action today, when a temporary lull suddenly occurred in the hurricane activity of the Atlantic.