Rising Sea Levels

When the waters start to rise, how will coastlines around the globe be affected? A clever mash-up of Google Maps and NASA data gives a graphic illustration of what could happen if sea levels rise by up to 14 metres.

Floodmap of London, 14M of sea-level riseGeorge Murphy, who commented on my North Polar Meltdown post, asked if I knew of any maps showing what might happen to coastlines when sea levels begin to rise. He’d had difficulty finding any. I didn’t know of any either, so I did a Google search for nasa climate change maps and found a site put together by Alex Tingle. Located at flood.firetree.net, Alex has managed to combine Google Maps with NASA data to produce a zoomable global map that can display the extent of coastline submersion when sea levels rise, up to 14 metres above current levels. The image on the left shows how London would be afflicted if the river Thames expanded under the pressure of an additional 14 metres of water (click these images to go to the site and see the maps there).

The shaded blue areas on this image show how a significant chunk of eastern England — and a sizeable area of Holland — would disappear if the North Sea rose by 14 metres:

Floodmap of part of England, 14M of sea-level rise

It’s not a perfect system, as Alex discusses at his blog — but it gives enough of an indication to give us all pause for thought.

Floodmap of part of Somerset, 14M of sea-level riseMy part of the world, the levels of north Somerset, has often been flooded in the past — notably, in 1607 — and this image shows how ravaged the area would be if sea levels rose by 14 metres. The shaded area closely coincides with the low-lying area that has been flooded in the past. Of course, when the land floods because of exceptionally high spring tides or crashing storm surges, the body of water subsides quite rapidly (though it leaves utter devastation in its wake, the effects of which last for many years). What this picture shows is the extent of the permanent loss of land that would occur if sea levels rose by 14 metres. My village of Banwell, about four miles inland from the current coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, will be nestling on the shoreline of the new coast. Weston itself will disappear. Worlebury Hill, just to the north of Weston, will become an island. Glastonbury, some ten miles inland, will also find itself all-but surrounded by water and accessible only by a narrow strip of land (currently the A39). Burnham-on-Sea will become Burnham-under-sea; the ancient settlements of Highbridge and Bridgwater — and many more villages and hamlets — will be no more.

Because of limitations in the way Alex has been able to overlay the NASA data on the Google Maps, they can only go up to an increase of 14 metres. This is probably more than enough for current needs — some say there’s going to be about one metre of sea level rise by 2100 — but if most of the ice on Greenland and the ice on the Antarctic continent were to melt away during the centuries to come, then a rise in excess of 25 metres is not out of the question.

And some estimate that if all the ice presently existing on earth melted, sea levels would rise by a staggering 70 metres.

Let’s hope we never go there.

Read my Climate Change posts in chronological order by using the Climate Change Log.

What’s In A Name?

My good blogging pal Nina, The Alien Next Door, tagged me a few days ago with this: What’s In A Name? Find your Name Sake.

The rules are simple, folks:

1) Go to http://www.google.com/
2) Click on Google images
3) Type in your name and search
4) Repost (w/ a link) the picture of the oddest, craziest, strangest, coolest, oldest, etc. person that shares your name. Post multiples if you find a few you like.
5) Have fun with it and pass it on.

Hmmm. The trouble for me is: I share a name with a very famous person, the Bob Kingsley who hosts the Country Top 40 US radio show. Googling our name brings up about 43,400 images, many of which on the first few pages are all to do with him. So I had to dig quite deep through the search pages to find some unrelated material!

Bob Kingsley, US versionFirst up, then: “the other” Bob Kingsley. After years of not communicating, I finally plucked up the courage to e-mail him when I started this blog some months ago, to let him know I’d written a page about how we shared the same name and profession. He very kindly replied, saying how he’d heard many years ago of an English BK whose strapline on a web directory for voice-overs was “the one and only Bob Kingsley”, which rather upset him. I was mortified to discover this after all these years, especially as the strapline was really not my invention but added by the web master at the time. (He’s forgiven me now!) BK’s show is syndicated across hundreds of stations, including Dixie 1057, from where this picture originates.

Bob Kingsley, British versionThen there’s me — a photo from about 27 years ago (crikey!), at a DevonAir Radio tribute site. Back in the days when I was also a radio DJ. I had the privilege of being the first voice heard on DevonAir when it began broadcasting in 1980 to Exeter in Devon. I also played the first-ever “split” commercial break in the UK a few months later, when the station added a second transmitter in the Torbay area and separate commercials had to be played simultaneously through the different transmitters. We were still using tape “carts” in those days — computerised, digital audio was still many years away — and each commercial break was a feverish couple of minutes, pulling played carts from two different players and stuffing the next ones in. The breaks often didn’t balance time-wise, so there were agonising moments of silence on one side as I waited tensely for the other break to catch up. Despite these occasional technical nightmares, it was one of the best times of my broadcasting life — I was part of a great team on a terrific station, living in a wonderful part of the world.

Kingsley, Michigan, mapI came across this map of Kingsley, Michigan amongst the many search results. It shows the location of Bob Mitchell & Associates and reminded me of a trip I once planned with my dear friends Chrissie and Mike Shepherd, though we never actually accomplished it. Idly searching one day for places around the world that carried our surnames, I was amazed to discover both a Kingsley and a Shepherd within about 90 miles of each other in Michigan. We intended to fly over for a holiday, hire a Winnebago and go travelling to our namesake towns. Sadly, we haven’t made it yet!

 

Kingsley House, MichiganIf ever we did make it, perhaps we’d stay at The Kingsley House at Saugatuck, Michigan — it looks like such a fabulous place! It’s within minutes from the resort towns of Saugatuck, Holland and South Haven. Experience all that Southern and West Michigan Beach resort towns have to offer. Sunsets over the beaches of Lake Michigan, Wine Country, Antiques, Dowhnhill and Cross Country Skiing are all close by. Wow.

 
 

Kingsley's mobile toilet!Finally, this little gem, a world away from The Kingsley House: this portable toilet is (presumably still) to be found in a village called Kingsley in Hampshire, here in the UK. Strangely enough, I used to live just a few miles from Kingsley some years ago. While the web site — The King’s Blog – Views From Kingsley (now, sadly, “withdrawn due to lack of interest”, it says rather pointedly) — doesn’t make it clear exactly which village of Kingsley it represents, it must be the Hampshire one, because the post that includes this pic, dated April 8th 2004, includes reference to another village called Bordon, which I know to be close by because that’s where I used to live! It also says (equally rather spookily): At long last Bob’s prayer has been answered and Kingsley now has its first public toilet. This fine example of “Georgian” architecture was observed on my morning inspection of Kingsley Common and I offer congratulations to the powers that be for responding to the obvious need for well maintained publicly accessible sanitation facilities. Anyone caught short on their way home from the Cricketers now only has to divert about half a mile along the track to Bordon and, no doubt, this will reduce the incidence of residents, possibly overtired, having to rush home with undue haste thereby increasing the risk of road accidents. (No, I’m not the “Bob” mentioned — but isn’t that odd though?)

There you have it. As time is pressing, I’m sure Nina will forgive me for not passing this tag on to others right now. Maybe later …

Google – The Cause Of My Crash?

Scary. Very scary.

Having spent the past week getting my PC back up to speed by reinstalling the various programs I’d lost with the reinstall of Windows XP, today I reinstalled Google Earth in preparation for creating some more Google Earth Challenge posts. It installed just fine — but when I downloaded some of the GE placemarkers I’d previously posted, and ran one of them, guess what? The screen froze for about ten seconds — and then up came the same BSOD I’d had before, telling me Windows had shut down to protect my computer because the NV4_disp driver had gone into an infinite loop.

OH NO!

I rebooted, and thankfully it came back. It seems ok for the moment.

I immediately uninstalled Google Earth.

This is very interesting. Scary, as I said, but interesting. Why?

Because one of the other programs I’d installed about a week or so before the last crash was Google Desktop. This is a program that displays all sorts of things in a sidebar — including feeds of photos and images it grabs from the PC’s hard drive as well as from feeds on the Internet. I’d also previously installed Google Photo Screensaver, which did a similar thing, displaying images as a screensaver. I hadn’t reinstalled that one as yet, and needless to say I’m certainly not going to reinstall it now!

It may well be that this is a problem limited only to Dell computers running nVidia graphics cards and Google programs. But then again — maybe not. Perhaps it’s more widespread. So be warned!

In the meantime, there’s no way I’m going to risk my PC once more by trying to persevere with running those Google programs on it again. I’ve got GE and GD running on the (Dell) laptop too, so I think I’m going to uninstall them from there as well, for safety’s sake. I’m too shaken up to take any further risks (despite having done backups of my important files!).