Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea

[mahatmakanejeeves]

As the accompanying article notes, there are several factors at work here.

Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: November 25, 2010

....
As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.

But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.

Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.

Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.

This too is of interest:

Explaining Norfolk’s Creeping Tides

November 26, 2010, 1:46 pm
Explaining Norfolk’s Creeping Tides
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Some readers responded skeptically to my Friday article about how Norfolk, Va., is handling encroaching seas. Many argued that auxiliary factors that I highlighted in my article like the compacting of landfill and natural land sinkage explained Norfolk’s problems in full and dismissed the notion that global sea rise played a role.

In fact, as my article explained, both land sinkage and the rising sea levels that scientists link to global warming are involved. But let me break it out a bit more.

Sea level rise is complicated to measure, of course, but there are two basic categories of statistics: local or isostatic, and global or eustatic. There is a fairly large scientific consensus that eustatic sea rise has been about 1.2 inches a decade over the last century and is accelerating. That would add up to 9.6 inches since 1930.

In my article I note that Sewells Point Naval Station estimates the local sea-level rise since 1930 as 14.5 inches. So global sea-level rise could conceivably account for about two-thirds of it.

The point here is that an assortment of factors are thought to play a role in how localities experience sea rise, from sea currents to proximity to glaciers (which are thought to act as water magnets) to geology. Norfolk certainly experiences tidal changes more acutely because of local geological factors, most notably its location on the edge of an ancient crater hole; the Chesapeake Bay area is sinking.

But scientists agree that land sinkage alone does not begin to answer why the tide is encroaching on Norfolk.

[Blue_Tires]

1. city of my birth...

good luck trying to make Cuccinelli understand this....