Worried that global warming will submerge your real estate? Here's the solution the town of Galveston hit upon after they were devastated by a hurricane in 1900: the entire town was hoisted up on stilts, and new fill placed underneath. The photographs are amazing—it was an impressive engineering project, and it was all done with manual labor.
It's also a little bit familiar. In my old home town, you could date the houses by their construction: the older ones were all built up on foundations that raised the floor a couple of feet off the ground, because the town was on a flood plain—my parents had photos of people canoeing down the streets when the Green River rose above its banks. There the solution was to build a dam on the river and control it that way, and that's when the newer houses could have these peculiar things called basements.
Damming the ocean is a rather bigger problem.
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Damming the ocean is a rather bigger problem.
There's just so much water. Damn that ocean!
"Damming the ocean is a rather bigger problem."
See, it's that sort of negative thinking that gets in the way of solving this little problem. BE the solution, PZ!
The Dutch don't seem to have much problem damming the ocean.
I'm having a Navin R. Johnson moment...damn these glasses. I damn thee ;-)
The Dutch have the right soil conditions, solid bedrock with little to no porosity. The glaciers swept all the light fluffy stuff away. There are some places where you conceivably could hold back a few meters of sea level. Greenland will produce 7 meters, the West Antartic ice sheet another 7 and the East Antartic ice sheet 50-60 meters.
I don't care how good the dike is, I would not live 100 feeet below sea level. I suspect that no insurance company would offer policies 100 feet below sea level either. No insurance, no mortgage, no mortgage, no real estate.
In Florida, the ground is limestone, highly porous, filled with voids. There is absolutely no way to hold back the sea in Florida, the ground is too porous. The ground is porous for hundreds of feet down.
When Greenland melts (when, not if), half of Florida is gone. Maybe you could have a house on stilts, but the tides would be pretty severe. It would take quite a few years for all the crap to clear itself out. There would be some pretty strong debris flows until that happens.
A little OT, but a major newspaper in New Zealand just today published a story (not an editorial!) on W's recent speech on climate change. Page 2 features some amusing translations from realpolitikese into English:
"In recent years, science has deepened our understanding of climate change and opened new possibilities for confronting it."
Translation: "In recent years my refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of global warming has contributed to my record low poll ratings. So now I have to look interested."
Question: what would be the odds of a piece like this running outside of the opinion pages in a major (like, New York Times-major) newspaper in the States?
Was this the Green River where paradise lay? Or am I too late in asking?
There's a certain disconnect between the growing acceptance of the evidence of rising sea level and the ongoing stories of how troubling it is that people aren't moving back to New Orleans in droves. I wish Brian Williams and the other turds on the evening news would put two and two together and at least suggest that perhaps some evacuees are reluctant to move back to the gulf coast because they realize it will be underwater again sometime soon. Maybe Bush would use this notion himself to justify his nonchalance about rebuilding New Orleans, but I guess he's too committed to pretending that the sea level isn't rising, or that Jesus will save the day, or whatever. Like Bill O'Reilly "throwing in with Jesus," Bush is throwing in with ExxonMobil and the other fiends who apparently think their profit margins will still mean something even when Wall Street is part of the intertidal zone.
I don't have kids yet, but I'm already trying to figure out how I'll explain to them that the most important job on Earth is also, for some reason, the hardest job to get fired from.
The Presidency of the United States is not the world's most important job.
The ocean is the home of devilfish - abominations. It is already damned. It has been so since the Triassic.
You know, as long as they are removing all those mountaintops in West Virginia, instead of using the tops to fill the creek valleys, maybe they should just load it all onto barges, ship it down to New Orleans, and slowly fill in the basin.
I don't even know here whether I am half serious or joking.
Before we worry about sea level rise, we'll have to worry about what the northward movement of the jetstream (which strongly influences where much of the rain falls in the temperate regions) will do to our crops.
Find out if you will have beachfront property or have to learn to breath water here:
http://flood.firetree.net/
"filled with voids" serious oxymoron I reckon!
I'm not attacking the poster, who made a good point, just that phrase caught my eye. Made me do a double take.
We can figure out what the administration really thinks if the small report of the Bushco "Golden Lifeboat" in Paraguay is verified. It was reported as "square miles" and "near petroleum & water reserves". Any solid leads?
That'll show you flood geology skeptics!
I know this will be self-evident to some of you, but while stilts will do a lot to protect a home from flood waters, they're pretty useless against a storm surge. My ex-grandmother-in-law (it's complicated) lived in a house on metal pilings a good 30 inches in diameter more than eight feet in the air in Pass Christian, Mississippi. The pilings are still there--the house was taken off completely by the storm surge. Fortunately, she was in Memphis at the time.
My hometown is below water level because of hydroelectric dams. Downstream of the dam the water level dropped, sure - but those of us upstream got a river that more than doubled in width and ate up the coastline. The Corps built levees around the town proper, but outlying homesteads were flooded and the entire waterfront had to be eminent domain'd. Back then people pretty much did what the government said, but I can't imagine a similar situation going over easily now. . .
Drat html. Just pretend the italics in my previous comment are appropriately placed.
>Damming the ocean is a rather bigger problem.
Maybe we should just let God dam it.
In Galveston they raised a whole brick church on stilts. Now tell me religion doesn't raise people's spirits, you evil atheists!
i live in south florida.
in ten years, one way of the other, i probably won't be. i'm hoping it's because i've moved, not because i've drowned. though right now, we could use a little water. it's not everyday that lake okeechobee catches on fire.
Ask and ye shall receive, arachnophilia. I'm in Fort Lauderdale and it just stopped raining for the first time in about 26 hours, and it looks like it'll start up again soon. And man, am I happy about that.
You don't dam oceans, you dike them.
Look at New Orleans for example. There's a brave city at water's edge and below sea level.
The Presidency of the United States is not the world's most important job.
Depends on how you define important. If your definition of important is the ability to thoroughly fuck up the largest percentage of the world's population during tenure, then yes, it probably is. Appropriate or not, the leadership of our country has influence on what happens in a lot of other places. Invade middle eastern countries, promise monetary aid to various African countries and then renege on it, manage to buddy up enough with a European leader enough that he ends up resigning due to the taint of being associated with you, etc.
By other definitions, the most important job is trash pickup. Just depends on your perspective at the moment.
Florida? Hah! Florida! Except for the steep mountains in its panhandle, Bangladesh has its highest point 6 m above sea level. And 144 million inhabitants. I wish you good-afternoon.
Ha! The flooding of coastal estuaries is not a zero sum game Ha Ha!
They'll BOTH be underwater.
Caledonian: Don't tease us -- what do you think is the world's most important job?
I'm all for those basements. They'll be great when future colleagues of mine excavate the town's ruins, long after the levee finally breaks.
I can honestly say that I don't know.
I DO know that the Secret Service agents who guard the life of the President are even more important than he is, though. If the President is obeying his Constitutional duties, it's their function to protect him. If not, they're the our final line of defense against tyranny, because they're the only ones likely to be able to kill him if he goes bad. So ensuring that they're aware of their duties and responsibilities is even more important than making sure the President does.
Since there's at least one job more important than the POTUS, it's not the most important position.
Rich (#13), that flood map is pretty damn scary. Very cool use of Google maps though. Thanks for the link!
Jericho is about 800 feet below sea level, no dams, no dikes . . . I'll bet that if there is an insurance company functioning in that area, one can get insurance there.
My more literate colleagues in geology tell me that if it ever floods, it'll stay flooded for 20,000 years or so, though. Which means,it hasn't been flooded for a while.
@Incertus: (#23)
veritably, my pool runneth over.
@David Marjanović: (#26)
yes, but i live in florida. i use examples that are close to home. either way, we don't have very many global warming skeptics here anymore. not when the last winter was more than 3 years ago. now we just need to get people to think ahead, and realize that being underwater is not a good thing.
@Ed Darrell: (#32)
take THAT genesis.
Coming to this a bit late, sorry...but I have a bit of an interest in floodplains, and it caught my eye. A couple things:
Chicago was elevated, too. On a few occasions, smaller towns in Illinois have been moved out of the floodplain entirely, with and without government involvement.
Regarding the Dutch dikes/insurance situation, I don't really know much about what's going on there, but judging by what's done in the US, it's conceivable they could get insurance. Certified levees have historically been viewed as removing protected areas from the floodplain, meaning property owners behind levees have often not been required to purchase flood insurance. The NFIP also allows flood insurance to be sold to those who would normally face impossibly steep actuarial rates.
Of course, lately insurance companies have been getting twitchy about levees, and there are a LOT of uncertified, poorly-maintained levees out there that people are still assuming protect them. Nevermind how unreliable certified levees may be.
daedalus2u wrote (#5):
Thanks for playing, but no. The Netherlands is essentially a river delta; any bedrock is well below the surface, and even if the last ice age did sweep away "all the light fluffy stuff," there's been plenty of time in the interim for the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt to deposit more. You're right that much of the soil in the coastal regions (clay) is not very porous, but that doesn't apply to the dikes, which are not the product of sedimentation. The dikes leak, and the main thing keeping the polders dry are the pumping stations. Trust me, I am Dutch.
Oh, and:
And this would be a bad thing why, exactly?
Florida? Hah! Florida! Except for the steep mountains in its panhandle, Bangladesh has its highest point 6 m above sea level. And 144 million inhabitants. I wish you good-afternoon.