Sonke Dangendorf says Louisiana and its residents may want to shift away from the traditional “flood fight” mentality and begin to live with the water around us. Since 2010, there has been more of that water.
Dangendorf is a David and Jane Flowerree Assistant Professor in the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is the lead author in a study which focused on rates of sea level change. It was published earlier this spring in Nature Communications.
The study specifically examined sea level rise along the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast regions. Dangendorf told me what he and a team of researchers found was a rate of sea level that was record breaking for those two areas.
“We were interested in sea level changes along the U.S. from 1900 until today. So, we analyzed tide gauge records. They’re basically wooden piles along the coastline that tracks sea level changes from areas up in Canada into the Gulf of Mexico. We looked at the average rates, but also changes over time and we found the hotspot of accelerated sea level rose basically since 2010 in an area from Cape Hatteras at the Outer Banks into the Gulf of Mexico with rates that even exceeded 10 mm per year. To put that into perspective, 10 mm per year means basically five times the amount that has been observed on average at most of these locations over the entire 20th century,” said Dangendorf.
To better understand how much the sea levels have risen along the Gulf and Southeast coasts, I found it useful to translate the rate of sea level rise to about half an inch per year. On top of the sea level at those locations rising faster than at any other time in the previous 100+ years, the Tulane scientists also determined that the particular rate of sea level rise of roughly half an inch per year was three times the global average during the same period of time. Dangendorf says man made climate change is a significant factor in the unprecedented rise in sea-level, but it’s not the only factor. What else is happening in the environment that’s causing the sea level along the Gulf Coast to rise so much more rapidly than ever before? And what does that mean for the people who call this region home? Listen to the podcast here.
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