A recent study found that once-in-a-century flooding events now strike on our planet about once a decade. The study, published June 10 in the journal Nature Climate Change, also found that human-driven climate change has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea level extremes since 1900.
As the ocean's potential to devastate coastal communities surges, Live Science spoke with Sönke Dangendorf, lead author of the Nature Climate Change study, to learn more about what's to come. Here's what he had to say.
Sönke Dangendorf: The absolute basis for doing these kinds of investigations is to work with observations, but observations are unfortunately sparse. We have a few more than 100 tide gauges [distributed worldwide] that offer long, century-scale records of sea level change since the early 20th century. We see that sea levels are changing at those locations, but we cannot tell a whole lot about what is happening elsewhere. So, what we can do is use the same climate models that we use to produce future projections of sea level change.
We found that we have seen already a 12-fold increase on average globally in what used to be a once-in-100-year event in 1900. And when we do these forcing experiments, we have also seen that anthropogenic forcing [human-driven change], in particular since the 1970s, has become the dominant force.
SD: A couple of centimeters of sea level rise doesn't sound like a whole lot in theory, but if you live along the coast, it hits you much harder than you might think. Just an example: I used to live along the U.S. East Coast in Norfolk, Virginia. The community was built along the water, and they used to be fine in the 1950s and 1960s; they wouldn't see flooding at all, or maybe just once every five or six years. But due to sea level rise, what happens now is that high tide leads to flooding. You see flooded streets, and that affects your commute, so people increasingly cannot make it to work.
With respect to what we assessed in these more extreme events, people may absorb a once-in-a-100-year event once in their lifetime. They may experience something like a Storm Sandy, and they may be able to recover from that, but if you think about recovering from that basically every eight years — the frequency of these events nowadays compared to 1900 — that's of course way more difficult and not feasible for many people.
SD: We can adapt. The silver lining here is that we have shown humans are the dominant forcing factor behind these changes. That's the silver lining because it means if we react, we can do something about it.
Flooding is becoming more severe and disruptive as our planet warms. (Image credit: Roberto Westbrook via Getty Images)
PP: What will the world look like in 2060 with the committed sea level rise?
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As an analogy, think about two hurdle runners. You have one hurdle runner that's compared to the tropics; he jumps very consistently but always below the hurdle, so he never makes it over. Then you have another hurdle runner that's the North Sea type of guy. His jumps are very variable. Sometimes he's very high and makes it over that hurdle, but very often he also jumps very low. Now think about lowering that hurdle, which is comparable to increasing sea levels. Suddenly, that hurdle runner who is very consistent makes it over all of the time, while the guy from the North Sea may jump over the hurdle a couple more times, but he also still has the very extreme lows. So, the constant jumper is way more sensitive to these changes.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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