Last month, marine biologist Andrew David Thaler whipped up a little gift for science fiction writers (he's got a serial himself) and apocalypseheads: Google Earth images of major cities drowned by rising seas. Here is Los Angeles in a world where the oceans have risen 80 meters (we hate to call any vision of a dystopian future "improbable," but this is a very unrealistic level of sea rise). The water stops just short of the Financial District and Historic Core, meaning the North South Park developers seem to know something that we don't. While LA is most likely going to be flooded by some variety of supervillain, Thaler was actually trying to make a point about climate change, and he writes about the project today over at Zócalo; any nearish-term sea-level rise would top out at about 1.5 meters, but "even a meter of sea level rise will produce devastating financial and social consequences around the globe—the flooding of coastal cities, mass migration of climate refugees, salt-water intrusion into aquifers and farmlands ... but the value in #DrownYourTown was not the precision of the models but the ability to take global issues that are often difficult to visualize and make them local."
· Why I Drowned L.A. and the World [ZPS]
· #DrownYourTown: Exploring Sea Level Rise through real-time, interactive, GIS modeling [SFS]
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