A study led by NASA has sent a scary message to California: large parts of the state could be submerged by the ocean in the next 25 years because of climate change.
They saw a scary future for the millions of people who live in California: their homes and towns could be washed away by rising waters. Cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco will see sea levels rise by twice as much as was previously thought by 2050.
The water level could rise more than one foot in the Los Angeles area, which just got through deadly wildfires that burned many parts of the city. In the San Francisco Bay Area, it could rise up to seventeen inches above current levels.
Slow collapses under the Big Sur mountains and the Palos Verdes Peninsula are pushing the ground down. This makes it more likely that places like San Rafael, Corte Madera, Foster City, and Bay Farm Island will be flooded.
According to Marin Govorcin, the lead researcher at NASA JPL, the double danger exists because “in many parts of the world, like the reclaimed ground beneath San Francisco, the land is moving down faster than the sea itself is going up.”
They think that by 2050, the sea level in California will be six to fourteen inches higher than it was in 2000.
The Central Valley Flood Protection Board says that since the 1960s, California has spent more than $100 million to fix damage caused by ground sinking. The financial stress is going to get worse as the situation gets worse, according to the Express US.
The study was done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NOAA has been hurt by the Trump administration’s budget cuts.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has cut the jobs of hundreds of people at NOAA and other climate-related organizations like FEMA.
Scientists and other experts are warning that these cuts could put lives at risk in future climate disasters and cause important climate change study to be put off. The study results were written up in the journal Science Advances.
