Los Angeles and other coastal region of the United States will encounter successive flooding, degraded infrastructure and other profound challenges as ocean levels ascend by however much 1 foot by 2050, a federal study delivered Tuesday found.
The report traces a disturbing new future for networks, biological systems and economies along the country’s seaboard, and predicts that the U.S. shore will insight as much ocean level ascent in the following 30 years as it did over the most recent hundred years.
“It is eye-opening – thirty years, 2050, isn’t unreasonably far away,” said Ben Hamlington, an examination researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge and one of the report’s lead authors.
Researchers found the United States coastline will see, on average, 10 to 12 inches of sea level rise by 2050. On the West Coast, the anticipated rise will be as high as 8 inches.