Month: February 2022

News Article by Ezra David Romero | KQED

The county in California most at risk from sea level rise is San Mateo, with nearly 100,000 people — half residents of color — living just three feet above the high-tide line. If climate models prove correct, rising seas threaten billions of dollars of homes and businesses, and hundreds of contaminated sites could harm residents if flooded.

“We’re at ground zero for the state, so it’s our responsibility to act,” said Len Materman, who leads the San Mateo County Flood and Sea Level Rise Resiliency District, or OneShoreline.

Sea levels along the California coastline, including the San Francisco Bay, could rise 7 to 21 inches by the year 2050, depending on how much and how quickly the world’s countries manage to cut carbon dioxide emissions. By the end of the century, with little drop in emissions, seas could rise by as much as 6.5 feet, according to a national study released last week. That’s from the climate emergency alone; storms, king tides and sinking land add inches to those estimates…

What will California’s coast look like in 100 years?

News Article by Elizabeth Hlavinka | Alta

Eighteen thousand years ago, give or take, the continental shelf 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco was exposed as a wide, flat coastal plain with an extensive system of dunes and river valleys connecting the Farallon Islands to the continental United States, which didn’t go by that name. Farther north, salt waters from the Pacific Ocean stretched all the way inland to present-day Sacramento.

Rising sea levels have continued to erode the shoreline ever since, as human beings established a society they would eventually call California. Some of our biggest cities were built in this 10 miles of dynamic coastline.

“We often think of the California coast as this high-relief terrain with active tectonics, which it is, but we’ve put millions of people in the lowest parts of the entire state, like the San Diego Bay, the San Francisco Bay, and the Los Angeles Basin,” says Patrick Barnard, the research director of the climate impacts and coastal processes team at USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz…