Rising sea levels will drown your Western art history course

http://grist.org/news/rising-sea-levels-will-drown-your-western-art-history-course/

?w=470&h=313
At least Macchu Picchu is probably safe from sea level rise.


You know how we sometimes like movies in which famous world landmarks are dramatically destroyed? Climate change is about to bring those scenes to a museum near you, albeit with fewer meteors and more meteoric sea level rise.

According to a new report published Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters, everything you love is going to disappear, assuming you are the kind of person who loves old art and history and stuff. The researchers looked at UNESCO World Heritage sites, which, like humans, tend to cluster near the coasts. They simulated flooding the world with an average of 6.6 meters of sea level rise over a couple of centuries. The result was a very soggy situation: About 140 of 720 sites surveyed would be underwater, or at least in the kiddie pool — and that’s without even accounting for storm surge. As one of the researchers encouragingly clarified, these are the low-ball estimates.

Among the soon-to-be-amphibious landmarks are Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, the Leaning Tower of Pisa (soon with extra leaning!), some old important-sounding German cities, downtown Bruges, and Naples (unless the volcano gets it first). If your tastes incline to the New World instead, you can focus your anxiety of impending loss on the Statue of Liberty and historic Havana. In any case, Atlantis is about to gain a whole bunch of cultural capital:



The purple dots are in trouble even if the thermostat stays where it’s at; everything else up to yellow will drown with just 3 degrees C extra.