Or…
Resettling the First American ‘Groundwater Hydrology Refugees’
Guest post by David Middleton
Featured image borrowed from the HuffPuff.
Once upon a time National Geographic magazine was a respectable publication.
By Michael Edison Hayden
PUBLISHED MAY 4, 2016
ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY Claudia Waller’s anxious eyes flit across the living room of a home where her family has lived for more than 80 years as she ponders the moment when she’ll have to leave for good.
When even a moderate rain falls in Atlantic City, the streets flood, reminding her of when her family lost their house’s foundation to Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Flood-damaged, abandoned properties are scattered throughout her neighborhood, roughly a mile from the city’s famous boardwalk, attracting homeless drifters, drug dealers, and sex workers. And making matters worse, Atlantic City’s public services are unreliable as the city is embroiled in a fiscal crisis.
“Climate change is a social inequity.”
Ben Horton | Rutgers University
“I get frightened every time it rains,” Waller says, biting her bottom lip. “It feels like all of us, everyone in Atlantic City, we’re sinking into the ocean.”
Sea level rise, caused by a confluence of melting polar ice caps and warmer temperatures expanding the ocean, could devastate Atlantic City in what its residents describe as a kind of “slow death,” one that takes the form of sporadic super storms and routine nuisance flooding, crumbling infrastructure, and endemic poverty.
[…]
Benjamin Strauss, a sea level expert at Climate Central, an organization of scientists, says that people in Atlantic City are uniquely vulnerable to rising seas because they inhabit a barrier island with extremely low and flat terrain.
His interactive map, “Surging Seas,” shows floodwaters surging into Boston, for example, would affect a much smaller percentage of the population than the same amount of water hitting Atlantic City. Strauss said that a four-foot surge, for instance, would inundate only 7 percent of Boston but 50 percent of Atlantic City.
[…]
“There’s no climate change denial with these folks here because they see what’s happening to their lives.”
Shawn Dickenson | A Future with Hope
“It floods on any rainy day lately, so these folks are obviously petrified of what could happen if another Hurricane Sandy strikes,” Dickenson says.
[…]
Horton’s research indicates that sea levels are rising faster than they have been in at least 2,700 years. He describes this change as manifesting in oblique ways, like warmer, wetter winters and a growing frequency of violent super-storms.
[…]
Horton is critical of the limited measures taken so far to preserve coastal cities and reduce rising levels of greenhouse gases.
[…]
“Climate change is a social inequity,” Horton says. “If nothing is seriously done to save these cities, or the people who live there, it represents a kind of retreat to me.”
[…]
Maybe I missed it… But I don’t think the word, “subsidence” appeared in the article.
It appears that the sea level as measured by tide gauge is rising about twice as fast as the sea surface is rising. Let’s take a closer look…
Why didn’t National Geographic ask “Benjamin Strauss, a sea level expert at Climate Central, an organization of scientists,” why the tide gauge differed so much from the actual change in sea level? For that matter, why didn’t National Geographic consult actual scientists?
The vast majority of the sea level rise at Atlantic City is due to subsidence, primarily from groundwater withdrawal…
How could any respectable publication fail to mention that two-thirds of the apparent sea level rise is actually due to subsidence? Did “Benjamin Strauss, a sea level expert at Climate Central, an organization of scientists,” inform National Geographic of this very pertinent fact?
Who is “Benjamin Strauss, a sea level expert at Climate Central, an organization of scientists”?
What is Climate Central? Who are these “scientists“?
There might be three or so activists with relevant scientific degrees; however most of Climate Centrals key people are political hacks and environmental activists.
Fun With Topographic Maps
I located USGS 7.5 minute quadrangles for Atlantic City from 1994 and 2014…
A quick planimetering exercise indicates that Atlantic City may have shrunk by 40 acres or so over the past 20 years. However, the difference is less than the margin of error in calibrating the maps and digitizing the outlines.
I also located an 1894 15 minute quadrangle from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas…
I made an animation of the three maps…
Atlantic City is clearly doomed H/T http://gifmaker.me/
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It’s called Atlantic City because it’s right on the Atlantic OCEAN. They planned it that way. They wanted it that way. So now people are surprised that the ocean affects it? Sigh…
Back in the early sixties, we received an invitation from a friend of my Father to stay with him in Atlantic City and go fishing.
His family’s house was one of the brownstone row houses within a block or two of the boardwalk.
As we carried our fishing gear into the entrance hallway, I stood amazed that the upper walls were clean painted while the bottom half were crusty and flaking.
When I asked the owner, he told me that the walls had been like that since the 1944 Great Atlantic hurricane and that the change line marked the height of the hurricane’s surge.
My Father’s friend did mention that they expected a hurricane someday to score a direct hit and eliminate the whole block. That event never happened as it was one of the city blocks claimed by the city and sold to casino developers.
They should be more concerned about Donald Trump rise and fall and the unemployment it has caused.
http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/08/16/donald-trump-atlantic-city-empire/
“attracting homeless drifters, drug dealers, and sex workers…”
Translation – High School Students.
Are there comments on the Nat. Geo. site? Do any of them mention subsidence?
21. Just one, my comment, posted about 2 minutes ago, mentions subsidence.
Atlantic City shouldn’t gamble on high seas when high seas are fact. Atlantic City is a barrier island on a swamp in a bay amidst a river delta system. It could get washed away several times over this century by even moderate “NorEasters”, the usual fate to which barrier islands must submit. That a barrier island exists at all proves the tidal range is small and that the Atlantic Ocean tolerates the existence of any island here. If located where the tidal range is larger, say Bay of Fundy, there would be no island. That it is due to climate change, or rising sea level, that this is unusual is preposterous and geological evidence proves this true. Those proposing a climate change fate deserve a course in marine geology to straighten their brain matter. That they have little knowledge of this illuminates their idiocy. One recommended example here was the annual expose from the one or two semester course in Deltaic Geology by Jim Morgan a marine geologist at Coastal Studies Inst. at LSU, now retired when I attended there as a grad student. Morgan outlined the sinking fate for the five or so sub-deltas that make up the Mississippi River mega-delta system. The river has occupied several locations along the 150 mile stretch of the Louisiana Gulf Coast. I had the opportunity to travel to these subdeltas by boat and helicopter to see the unrecognizable one-time deltas of the past Mississippi River that were nothing like today’s Birdfoot subdelta. TO: MR. CLIMATE CHANGE PROMOTER: Were the Chandeleur or Bayou Lafourche or Atchafalaya sub-deltas (I cannot remember all of Morgan’s exact named subdeltas) now sunk almost out of site due to climate change 10,000, 100,000 or 500,000 or a million years ago just because they have now disappeared? Hogwash. Climate enviros just need an education in facts rather than Bill Nye-like junk science. Oh and they need to remove the “science” from Political Science.
The “grandaddy” of mapping the last 16 deltas of the Mississippi over the last 8,000 years or so once sea level became fairly stable in the wake of the Wisconsin melting off what became Chicago is: Frazier, D. E., 1967, Recent deltaic deposits of the Mississippi River: Their development and chronology: Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, v. 27, p. 287–315.
A good recent look at both Frazier and the “Big Picture” is McLindon, C., 2014. Rethinking coastal restoration: The delta cycle and land area change in the Louisiana Coastal Plain, available at: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/climate/docs/The_Delta_Cycle_and_Land_Area_Change_in_Coastal_Louisiana.pptx. McLindon has been giving this slide show, with updates, to numerous geological societies and several national conventions held in Louisiana and Texas since March of 2014.
Bryan Stephens, then of MMS, now BOEM, won AAPG paper of the year in 2010 for this one;
Stephens, B. P., 2009, Basement controls on subsurface geologic patterns and coastal geomorphology across the northern Gulf of Mexico: Implications for subsidence studies and coastal restoration: Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, v. 59, p. 729-751, available at: http://www.nogs.org/Content/pdf/Stephens.pdf
ACTIVE GEOLOGICAL FAULTS AND LAND CHANGE IN SOUTHEASTERN LOUISIANA; A Study of the Contribution of Faulting to Relative Subsidence Rates, Land Loss, and Resulting Effects on Flood Control, Navigation, Hurricane Protection and Coastal Restoration Projects; Contract No. DACW 29-00-C-0034,July 2003; available at: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/katrina/govdocs/faults.pdf A shorter version was
published as Gagliano, S. M., E. B. Kemp, III, K. M .Wicker, K. S. Wiltenmuth, and R. W. Sabaté, 2003, Neo-tectonic framework of southeast Louisiana and applications to coastal restoration: Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, v. 56, p. 262-276.
The late Roy K. Dokka (LSU prof; d. 1 Aug 2011; his last paper). The role of deep processes in late 20th century subsidence of New Orleans and coastal areas of southern Louisiana and Mississippi. 116 Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth B06403 (1-17) (2011). Available at:
http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/climate/docs/TT_Dokka20112010JB008008.pdf
See also: Haggar, K. S., 2014, Coastal land loss and landscape level plant community succession:
An expected result of natural tectonic subsidence, fault movement, and sea level rise: Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, v. 64, p. 139–159. Available at: http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/Haggar-Goose-Point.pdf
Besides isostatic effects there is tectonic subsidence. As it’s created, the material in the North American Plate cools and subsides the further it gets from the Mid Atlantic Ridge and the upward limb of the convection. The entire Atlantic coast is a Passive Margin.