Scientists warn New Orleans will be underwater by 2100 - and half the city is already below sea level
A huge warning has been placed at the feet of millions of New Orleans residents, with the very real threat that the city could be underwater within 75 years.
Reported by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, known worldwide for being the creators and updaters of the harrowing Doomsday Clock, they warn that 'the process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately'. Evidently, it's not just New Yorkers who should be worried.
The alert has been put out to countless people in the Louisiana city region off of the back of a brand new scientific paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal.
And given that New Orleans already sees the majority of its land placed under sea level, it's not a situation that looks like it's going to get any better giving the impending threat from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain, entrapping the city on three sides.
Southern Louisiana at risk
With sea levels rising, the world getting warmer, and hurricanes growing in strength year on year, the Bulletin team warn that its being made worse by a 'coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry'.
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As it stands, the new journal warns that southern Lousiana is facing sea-level rises of between three and seven meters. All in all, it'll lose 75% of its remaining costal wetlands, with the current shoreline moving a massive 100 kilometers inland from where it currently sits - making it the 'most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world'.
The study says New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be completely stranded; two metropolitan areas with more than 2.2 million Americans currently residing.
'New Orleans is gone'
“In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has,” said Jesse Keenan, a climate expert at Tulane University and one of the paper’s co-authors.
He said: “Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered.
It will be surrounded by open water, and you can’t keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There’s no amount of money that can do that.”
Half of New Orleans is already below sea level
By design, New Orleans is up and down, meaning where would be flooded earlier remains a bit of a 'a little here, a lot there' situation.
According to one 2007 study by Tulane and Xavier University, 51% of the urbanized portions of the Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes 'lie at or above sea level'. By design, the most densely inhabited areas in this part of Louisiana are on higher ground given the historic issues with flooding.
As it stands, the city currently lies on average between one and two feet below sea level but some areas reaching as high as twenty feet below sea level in Uptown, showing just how wildly impacted future flooding would hit the city.
One thing New Orleans and its people have is time, with the paper's co-author Keenan saying this is a chance to invest in long-term infrastructure inland.
He said: “This could be an opportunity for New Orleans to help migrate people further north, invest in long-term infrastructure and make that sustainable.
“That exodus has already begun, so if nothing is done, people will just trickle out over time and it will be an uncoordinated mess. The market will speak as people won’t be able to get insurance. Louisiana has to stop the bleeding and acknowledge this is happening. But at the moment there is no plan.”
Topics: US News, Environment, Science, Climate Change, Doomsday Clock
Tom Earnshaw