![]() With an anticipated rise of approximately 1.5 meters by 2100, Miami will be completely inundated. The project culminated with a street-level tour through Miami, the city that likely faces the greatest financial threat from climate change. The software packages used to produce these models are freely available and the instructions are here. Over the next week, I continued taking requests (albeit at a much more modest pace) and released a step-by-step guide so that anyone interested could drown their own town. I also received word that the #DrownYourTown hashtag was trending in several of the cities I had simulated. I discussed how I made these models-and their limitations. Along the way I shared information resources about climate change and sea level rise. By the end of the two hours, I’d created 52 models of sea level rise around the world. Requests came from all over the world, including India, Australia, Croatia, and many island nations. Others were incredibly far-fetched, such as Reno, Nevada, which required a rise of 1,500 meters to get wet. Some images were disturbingly plausible, like a deluged Ocean City, Maryland, nearly wiped out by a 1-meter rise in sea level. For two hours, I fielded requests from any and all to simulate sea level rise in their hometowns. The next morning, I launched #DrownYourTown, an interactive experiment in real-time GIS (geographic information systems) modeling, climate change, and Twitter. People were clamoring to see their hometowns flooded. Pleased with the results, I shared some of those images on Twitter.Īlmost as soon as I posted my first image, I began receiving messages from followers asking me to submerge their cities, too. North Carolina was a warm, shallow sea stretching from the Outer Banks to Rocky Mount. Telegraph Hill was an island in the expanded San Francisco Bay. In D.C, only the Washington Monument rose above the encroaching Potomac. Los Angeles was completely inundated south of the financial district. The results were stark, post-apocalyptic images of city skylines, submerged. I took to Google Earth and Inkscape-both free, readily available software packages-and simulated 80 meters of sea level rise. As the characters in my story ventured closer to shore, I realized I needed a simple way to visualize what that world would look like. In 2013, I had been writing installments of a serialized science fiction novel about a world in which the oceans have risen nearly 80 meters and most of the human race now lives at sea. ![]() One day, I’ll look back fondly and tell my grandkids about the week I spent flooding the planet. ![]()
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January 2023
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