According to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, rising sea levels caused by climate change may force residents of coastal areas of the United States to move inland - not just to adjacent areas, but much further.

“We typically think of sea level rise as a challenge to coastal areas,” says study author Matthew Hauer. “But if people leave one place, they have to end up somewhere.”

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in January predicted sea level rise of 0.3 to 2.5 meters by 2100. Previous research by Hauer and others estimated that the number of Americans displaced by rising seas during the same period would be 13.1 million.

While residents of low-lying coastal areas are likely to migrate to nearby inland regions, the model suggests that even landlocked states such as Nevada, Arizona and Wyoming will see significant influxes.

Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is located, is projected to add up to 117,000 climate migrants by the end of the century. Counties in Wyoming, western Montana, Central Colorado and northern Utah will also be populated.

Previous research has shown that people leaving their homes often choose places where they have family connections or better job prospects, even if those places are far away, Hauer said.

While municipalities typically don't consider climate migrants in their long-term planning, he says they should start doing so because the effects of rising sea levels are already making themselves felt. “You shouldn’t think of it as a jump from zero to several meters. We must understand that this is a gradual process,” he said.

What will happen if the whole world warms by 4 degrees? What cities will look like Soon San Francisco and California may go under water, the San Andreas Fault has begun to move Hurricane Maria weakens to Category 1, but danger of hitting the US remains Cities on the North Coast of the United States went under water

The US East Coast faces increased flooding in the future. This conclusion was reached by scientists from the University of Bonn, the Universities of South Florida and Rhode Island.

The states of Virginia, North and South Carolina, according to them, face the greatest risk. Their coastal regions are sinking at a rate of approximately 3 mm per year, primarily due to anthropogenic factors. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports, which belongs to the Nature publishing group.

Flooding in East Coast cities such as Miami has already become a very common occurrence. They are caused by hurricanes such as Katrina or the modern Harvey and Irma, but these cities are often flooded on sunny and relatively calm days. Although this does not result in casualties, it does cause damage to homes and infrastructure and impede traffic flow. We are talking about the so-called “nuisance flooding”.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that in the future these “troubles” will only become more frequent. An international team of scientists used GPS and satellite data to study the geophysical parameters of the East Coast. It turned out that it was slowly but steadily sinking into the Atlantic Ocean.

“There are at least two reasons for this phenomenon,” explains scientist Makan Karegar from the University of South Florida (now a visiting researcher at the Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation at the University of Bonn). “During the last ice age, about 20 thousand years ago, a large part of Canada was covered by an ice sheet "This gigantic mass of ice put pressure on the continent, causing it to sink in the central part and at the same time rise in the coastal regions. When the glacier melted, this process went in the opposite direction, and now the East Coast, on the contrary, is being submerged under water. This has been going on for several millennia." .

However, this geological effect only partially explains the flooding of coastal regions. Indeed, during the last decade, the subsidence of the area between 32 and 38 degrees latitude occurred much faster than during the previous thousand years, and in some parts it reached a speed of 3 mm per year. Melting ice sheets are responsible for only a third of this figure.

Scientists believe that the reason for this is intensive extraction of groundwater. Water, like carbon dioxide bubbles in a cake, causes some of the land to rise up. “Groundwater holds back land subsidence. Without them, the earth shrinks even faster,” says Makan Karegar.

Many cities on the American East Coast were founded in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The researchers calculated that due to the glacier effect alone, these cities now lie about 45 cm lower than four hundred years ago. In recent years, they have sank much faster in some places due to groundwater withdrawal. The next factor is rising sea levels due to global warming.

This growth, according to scientists, should greatly accelerate in the future. “Even if groundwater drainage is reduced, flooding will continue to increase,” warns Karegar. - The amount of money spent on restoring damaged infrastructure will also only increase. Therefore, it is logical to assume that it is in the interests of the United States to combat climate change with all its resources.”

In our article we will talk about the great soothsayer Vanga, whose predictions shook the whole world, one of which says that America will go under water.

Birth of a clairvoyant

She appeared on the last day of January 1911 at exactly twelve o'clock at night, in the small town of Strumica, which belonged to the Ottoman Empire, today part of Macedonia.

Vangelia Pandeva Gushterova was born in the family of a poor Bulgarian. The clairvoyant's name means "good news." As a newborn, she was so weak that her parents did not even call her, thinking that she would die. But the baby with her fingers and toes connected, born two months early, with her ears attached to her head, survived against all odds.

In those days, the child was named according to local custom, according to which the name was given by the first person he met on the street. The girl received the name Andromache, which was rejected by her grandmother, and the soothsayer was named Vangelia. Perhaps this name saved the girl; after her baptism on February 26, she began to recover sharply.

Difficult childhood

The war began, and my father had to go to the front of the First World War as part of the Bulgarian army. At the same time, the mother dies during childbirth. The three-year-old baby was left alone. She was taken in by her Turkish neighbor Asania, with whom she lived for three years.

The head of the family returned from the war when the girl was seven years old. The father married again. A caring stepmother raised her until she was 12 years old. It should be noted that Vanga was a very hardworking and cheerful girl. She loved to play blindfolded, to look for objects while blindfolded, so, probably, her gift was already breaking through then.

Loss of vision

In 1923, another tragedy occurred. The girl went blind. The reason for this was a hurricane, which threw her very far from the spring where she drank water with other children. And only in the evening she was found lying on the ground, far from the house, covered with branches.

Vanga's eyes were filled with sand. She needed an urgent operation, but the family had no money, and four years later the girl became completely blind. The reason for this was also poor nutrition due to a miserable existence.

Blind Vanga became a burden to her parents, helpless, and needed care. It was decided to send my daughter to Serbia, to a school for the blind. Fifteen-year-old Vangelia studied the alphabet for the blind and other sciences there, studied music, and mastered the piano. Moreover, she learned to clean things up on her own and even cook.

Difficult youth

A difficult fate continued to haunt her. Tank's stepmother died giving birth to her fourth child, and the baby also did not survive. So she returned home to help her father. The blind girl was excellent at housework. She learned to knit at a school for the blind, which brought in a small income. My father worked as a shepherd and laborer, but there was still a catastrophic lack of money. Soon Vanga herself will become seriously ill with pleurisy. Her family lost hope that she would survive, but she got back on her feet.

In 1940, my father fell ill with a terrible disease of blood poisoning. And he died soon, he was 54 years old. Vanga foresaw his death. The brothers went to a neighboring village to work as laborers, leaving her with her sister. As fate would have it, two years later she met her future husband, Dimitar Gushterov, with whom she moved to the city of Petrich.

Vanga's abilities

The seer easily identified people's illnesses and predicted fate. Visitors from all over the world came to see her. Vanga could point to a specific doctor who would help get rid of the disease.

Vanga claimed that she received information about people without reading their thoughts. It came from the spirits of the dead, transparent and glowing with a bright flame, who, like the living, move, sit and laugh. Another way of knowledge was through a mysterious voice.

Her predictions

The collapse of the USSR, the victory of Boris Yeltsin in the presidential elections, the tragedy with the Russian submarine "Kursk", the terrorist attack in America on September 11, natural disasters and many other events. We will talk about one prediction in more detail: how America will go under water.

According to the soothsayer, the United States will disappear from the face of the earth.

Let's talk about the prophecy of how America will go under water. Sergei Kostornoy, a journalist and relative of Vanga, voiced the prediction that the clairvoyant gave in a narrow circle of relatives and friends. But it was ordered not to release information to the masses until a certain point. Back in the 70s, she said that America does not exist, that she does not see it.

She did not say literally that America would go under water. She spoke about events, namely that the United States will be led by the 44th black president, who will be the last ruler. This will be due to the fact that the continent freezes or suffers from a terrible economic crisis.

The soothsayer Vanga indirectly said that America would go under water. In recent years, it has been hit by many natural disasters such as tornadoes, disastrous floods, deadly tornadoes and hurricanes. She never spoke about the apocalypse, but she predicted that some countries would disappear from the face of the earth. Therefore, it is unknown in what year America will go under water.

What else did Vanga say about America?

She predicted that the country would be mired in a terrible economic crisis, which would be a consequence of the disintegration of the States into independent lands with new leaders.

She argued that the United States would independently recognize the dominance of the new leader in the person of Russia, which would gain unprecedented power by uniting all the Slavic countries, which would only grow stronger over the years. Russia will enlist the support of China and India. And peace will reign, all wars and troubles will end. Thus, Vanga did not specifically say that America would go under water.

What is the opinion of scientists?

They predict that due to the melting of Antarctica's glaciers, by 2100 New York will be completely buried under water.

The water level in the world's oceans is rising much faster (by 25%) than predicted. Raising the level to two meters is already a disaster, but five is expected. And within half a century, many large cities from all over the world will disappear under the water column. Scientists estimate that by 2050 the eastern coasts of the United States, Canada and Latin America will be flooded. Australia will suffer.

American scientists also made a statement that the water level in the northeastern part of the United States is rising three or even four times faster than throughout the Earth as a whole. A rise in sea level of just one meter will lead to more frequent flooding. It will happen not once every century, but one every three years. This is similar to the prediction "America will go under water."

Scientists also see the apocalypse for the United States and North America as a result of terrible and powerful earthquakes, due to which all coastal areas will be flooded.

If we compare the forecasts of scientists and Vanga’s prediction “America will go under water,” it becomes clear that a general picture emerges. But, unfortunately, people do not take this information seriously.

American scientists report an amazing phenomenon: sea level off the northeastern coast of the United States over the past few decades has been rising 3-4 times faster than on the planet as a whole. These are the conclusions of experts from the US Geological Survey and Cartography Service. This coastal strip is home to New York, Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia, among others.

What is the reason for this strange phenomenon? According to scientists, the Gulf Stream is most likely to blame. Typically, the water level in its center is 1-2 meters higher than off the coast of the United States. The fact is that due to the high speed of water movement and the associated pressure difference, a kind of ridge appears in the middle of the flow.

However, recently the Gulf Stream has weakened somewhat, which, according to scientists, explains the excessively strong rise in sea levels in Boston, New York and Baltimore.

The weakening of the Gulf Stream, says oceanographer Peter Howd, leads to the fact that this elevation is not so pronounced and part of the water shifts to the edges of the stream. That is, in the middle part of the flow the water level decreases, and on the periphery it increases.

Over the past 30 years, the water level on the coast has risen by more than 10 centimeters. If this trend continues, it can lead to the most severe consequences and, above all, to devastating floods. In particular, New York's power plants, which are located close to the shore to facilitate their supply of fuel and cooling water, will be hit hard. And this is not the last misfortune. In recent years, New York has had to close the subway completely due to storm surges. The author of these lines, on one of his business trips to New York, had to run away from the subway station when water had already begun to flood the platform. Local residents say that they have already begun to get used to such floods.

Many local airports are also at risk of flooding: after all, they are also located near the coast.

Many owners of yachts and boats are also at risk: if the water rises, all these boats could end up on the streets of New York.

Of course, the root cause of all these phenomena is the ongoing global warming. It launched many mechanisms that seriously affect the Earth's climate.

Studies have shown that even if it is possible to stop and even reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by the end of this century the water level in the World Ocean will rise by 75-80 centimeters. This is due to its high inertia.

The ocean reacts with great delay to the strengthening of the greenhouse effect. Therefore, even if emissions are sharply reduced, water levels will continue to rise for a long time.

Rising sea levels are quite real, but instead of flooding the land, we should expect an increase in its area.

New estimates of the rate of sea level rise have given rise to downright panicky comments in the press - they say that the largest US cities will be flooded by 2100. It is easy to see that in Russia, too, huge areas should be flooded. Others point to coastal cities, located tens of meters below sea level, and yet have existed comfortably for centuries and millennia. Who is right - pessimists or optimists? Is it worth doing anything at all in connection with the onset of the sea or “it will do as it is”?

Is the person to blame?

Today people emit 33 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, mostly from burning coal. It’s not difficult to check these data; just remember that in the reaction C + O 2 = CO 2, humanity adds this same C (coal) 8 billion tons per year. There are only three trillion tons of carbon dioxide in the planet's atmosphere, which means we are adding more than a percent extra per year. Half of this percentage is absorbed by vegetation and rocks, and no one has time to absorb half. This makes carbon dioxide - which is now about 400 parts per million in the air - increase by two parts per million every year.

“spread-legged.” Therefore, it easily absorbs long waves of infrared radiation that “flow around” smaller molecules of other air gases. Hence the inevitable warming, from which reconstructions of the defeat of the knight dogs on the ice of Lake Peipsi have to be carried out on snow-free dry grass. Warming annually is a quarter of a trillion tons ice in Greenland alone, and also warms the surface water of the seas - and it expands due to heating. The influx of melt water and the expansion of sea water mean an inevitable rise in sea level. According to the latest satellite data, by 3.2 millimeters per year.

It doesn’t sound particularly scary, but this means 32 centimeters per hundred years. If the level of carbon dioxide emissions remains at the same level and does not decrease, a sharp acceleration is possible. Then by 2100 the World Ocean may rise by 0.6 meters. The most radical ecologists round this figure to the nearest meter. However, the latter assessment, frankly speaking, lacks any scientific basis and we would not recommend taking it seriously.

And yet you can’t brush aside the whole sea. In many coastal cities, a very large part of the territory lies 30–60 centimeters below sea level. In addition, as the sea rises, it washes away the shores more intensely with breaking and storm waves and, as a result, can “eat” them more than can be expected from these seemingly small 32 centimeters. Don't forget one more thing - sea level will not stop rising in 2100, but will continue to rise for hundreds of years until CO 2 returns to its previous level.

The process of “eating” sushi has already begun. The mosaic-tailed reef rat on Bramble Cay, off Papua New Guinea, was declared extinct by rising sea levels in 2016. Its low island began to be flooded too much by storms, raising the water noticeably above normal levels. The unfortunate unique species of rodent is banal until the last specimen.

How fast is the Earth's landmass shrinking?

Common sense tells us that if the sea advances, then the land area should decrease. As is often the case, common sense is wrong.

According to satellite images, water reclaimed 115,000 square kilometers from land between 1986 and 2016. But the onset of the sea has nothing to do with it. It took only 20,135 square kilometers - less than a fifth. Lakes that formed on the site of former Himalayan glaciers, as well as ordinary lakes and rivers that became fuller due to more precipitation, have conquered much more area. After all, an increase in global temperatures inevitably leads to an increase in evaporation, and all evaporated water must fall somewhere - which is why precipitation will continue to increase.

During the same time, land took away 173,000 square kilometers from the sea (a full percentage of Russia's territory). As a result, the total area of ​​the earth's surface is 58,000 square kilometers. But this is larger than the territory of Croatia and approximately equal to Latvia. How did this happen?

The answer to this question is obvious. Rising temperatures and evaporation levels mean that areas where there used to be swamps are gradually drying up. When temperatures were lower, the water did not have time to evaporate from there, but after warming, it began to do so. As a result, rivers, lakes and reservoirs close to them reduce their area. For example, in the Ob basin, the area of ​​water has decreased by three thousand square kilometers over 30 years. Of course, this will not continue indefinitely - after the depletion of Siberian-type swamps, the process will inevitably stop.

The advance of the sea is an unplanned consequence of human activity. However, in addition to random, thoughtless actions, a person sometimes takes deliberate actions. Rarely, but it happens. Among them is irrigation, which takes water from lakes and reservoirs (just remember the former Aral Sea). Due to this factor and the retreat of rivers and swamps in waterlogged regions, the land gained almost 140 thousand square kilometers.

What remains is the strengthening of the sea coasts, as well as the deliberate expansion of land by man at the expense of the sea. They took 33,700 square kilometers. That is, in the struggle between sea and land, the earth's firmament leads with a score of 34:20.

In general, the forecast is disappointing. The advance of the sea will continue to lead to a reduction in its area and an expansion of land areas. What’s even worse is that the forces of nature itself have already begun to join this process.

Natural expansion of land

The fact is that the land on which we live is something like foam formed when cooking broth. The earth's mantle acts as a broth, incredibly heated and filled with rising hot currents. It lifts up lighter rocks, and it is these that form the continental crust, floating on top of the global ocean of magma. Ice at the poles and on mountain glaciers appeared in noticeable quantities geologically recently - even 40 million years ago there was much more CO 2 in the Earth’s air, so there was no permanent ice at the poles.

After the formation of ice caps, they began to put pressure with their mass on the continental crust near the poles, and it began to “sink” - to sink lower into the mantle. That is why the Antarctic Lake Vostok, which arose as a reservoir on the surface of the Earth, today is half a kilometer below sea level - this is how this area was “pressed” down by four kilometers of ice accumulated above it.

Let's go back to today. Global warming, caused by human negligence, is leading to the melting of ice. Because of it, Greenland becomes a trillion tons a year lighter - and sooner or later this will lead to the fact that the island will stop “sinking” and begin to “float”. Then the area of ​​its hard rocks located above sea level will begin to grow noticeably. Fortunately, this process is long-term, so those living today will not experience it. However, future generations will inevitably have to face it.

There is another unpleasant mechanism by which nature itself increases the land area. As already Life, rising sea levels lead to the advance of breaking waves onto the shore. If there are no “dragging” currents near the shore, then there is nothing to carry away sand and other solid particles from the shore being eroded by the waves. As a result, the surf carries them back to the shore - but already higher than they were before the surf. This process has already increased the area of ​​Tuvalu by 2.9 percent (for 1971–2014). Considering that the process of sea invasion is at the very beginning, many more ocean islands can expect an increase in area.

Another mechanism for the natural growth of continents is river sediment. Even during the period of Ancient Egypt, the modern Nile Delta was a sea. But the waters of the Nile intensively eroded its banks and brought a lot of sedimentary rocks, gradually “washing out” the modern Nile delta. As the planet's temperatures and precipitation increase, water erosion will increase. More rain inland will produce more particles, which rivers carry to the shores of the seas. They will create new delta islands, and the sea will become even smaller.

Why is the United States, on the one hand, “afraid” of drowning, and on the other hand, prohibits the taking of land from the sea?

Once upon a time in the States there were no legal restrictions on the reconquest of land from the sea - and then this country was actively involved in such things. For example, the main part of the city of San Francisco was the sea, the shores of which were extended into the sea by private developers - for example, dredgers, special vessels that extract wet soil from the seabed and wash it onto the shore.

As often happens with private initiative not limited by the state, things went uphill. It quickly became clear that the cost of a hectare of land in a port city is noticeably higher than the cost of reclamation of a hectare of land near the coast. By the 1960s, there was a very real danger of the disappearance of San Francisco Bay - the greed of private developers was reducing its area so quickly that the townspeople became seriously worried.

A movement was created, which, as its name suggests, aimed to preserve the bay. Moreover, by that time its area had increased from 1800 to 1000 square kilometers. The results of the struggle are impressive - since then the attack on the sea there has stopped. And this is the best illustration of how much the “advance of the sea” really worries the people of the United States.

What will really happen

Apocalyptic pictures of drowned cities have very little relation to reality. Even without any centralized action at the level of the US federal authorities, the major cities of this country face very little threat from the sea. Coastal cities are already constantly building dams, dams or artificial beaches (all the beaches of Miami are like this, for example). It is inexpensive, but during storms, when the water level rises by meters, it greatly reduces the scale of destruction. All this coastal protection infrastructure is constantly being updated, and as sea levels rise by 3.2 millimeters per year, it will gradually adapt to this increase.

Some kind of flooding is possible only where the state is centralized, but at the same time so weak that it does not take any measures to protect against storms at all. There are no such strange states in the world yet. Even Bangladesh, for which the greens often prophesy death in the waves, in fact. Yes, in theory it can be assumed that if Russia again falls into a coma, as in 1917–1921 or in 1991–1999, then it is quite possible that it will not be able to respond to rising sea levels. In practice this is unrealistic. The Time of Troubles here does not last longer than tens of years, and during this time the onset of the water element will not have time to lead to significant consequences.

In addition, we must understand that global warming will be accompanied by an increase in population density in the northern regions of the country. If today's forecasts are correct, then by the end of this century Murmansk will have the climate of modern Yaroslavl, or even Moscow. Obviously, a more developed and populated coast will be much easier to protect with dams - construction capacity will be closer.

Nevertheless, this is not a reason to do nothing. In our country there are very sparsely populated regions with low coastlines - such as some coastal areas of Yamal and the coast of the Arctic Ocean in general. There is practically no strong surf that could “raise” the coastline, like Tuvalu. There is little infrastructure there, and without it and the gradual rise of the coastline, the sea will flood large areas before the federal government comes to its senses and develops some kind of action plan. Considering how “suddenly” winter is coming in our cities for city authorities, there is no doubt that the reaction to the flooding of the shores of the Russian Arctic will also be somewhat delayed.

However, once the state realizes the existence of such a problem, combating it will not be too difficult. A sea level rise of 0.32 meters over a hundred years may sound like a big problem - after all, Russia has about 40 thousand kilometers of coastline (however, some of them are quite high). But if the efforts to protect the banks are distributed evenly, the equivalent of only four hundred kilometers of dams per year will have to be built. A dam as high as a school ruler. The main thing is to start early.