RISING seas to the right, rising seas to the left. The US will face extreme sea level rise on its east and west coasts, according to two new reports.
The news may come as a surprise in North Carolina, where legislators have been debating a bill forbidding coastal managers from predicting that sea level rises will accelerate. The bill was passed by the state鈥檚 Senate but .
Just as well: sea level rise on the US east coast is accelerating up to four times as fast as the global average. That trend was identified by team at the US Geological Survey in St Petersburg, Florida, using tide gauge data from 1950 to 2009. The increase is greatest in an area extending over 1000 kilometres from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to Boston, and possibly north into Canada ().
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鈥淪ea level rise is accelerating faster than the global average on the east and west US coasts鈥�
Over in southern California, sea levels could rise between 42 and 167 centimetres by 2100, according to a National Academy of Sciences . The coast is subsiding south of Cape Mendocino 鈥� as a result, the relative rise there will be higher than the global average.
Further north, into Oregon and Washington, the 2100 rise is predicted to be a more modest 10 to 143 cm because the land is rising. If a major earthquake were to hit the area, however, it would sink the land by a metre.