Venice Isn’t Alone: 7 Sinking Cities Around the World – How Stuff Works

Digital illustration of a sinking statue of liberty, USA, free to use, via Pixabay

Many big cities sit near the ocean. They became cities in the first place because their ports facilitated trade and travel by sea.

Coastal cities all over the world are sinking — a geological process called subsidence — and it’s happening at a rate that makes scientists nervous. If these bits of land didn’t have important cities on them, it’s likely nobody would notice, or, in some cases, that they wouldn’t be sinking at all…

Every Coastal Home Is Now a Stick of Dynamite – the Atlantic

Aerial view of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast, Oct. 30, 2012. (DVIDSHUB: U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen CC BY 2.0 via Flickr).

Wealthy homeowners will escape flooding. The middle class can’t.

The Langfords got out of Houston just in time. Only two months after Sara and her husband, Phillip, moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2017, Hurricane Harvey struck, destroying their previous house and rendering Sara’s family homeless…

Global Weather Patterns and Coastlines

Coasts are sensitive to sea level rise, changes in the frequency and intensity of storms, increases in precipitation, and warmer ocean temperatures. In addition, rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing the oceans to absorb more of the gas and become more acidic. This rising acidity can have significant impacts on coastal and marine ecosystems.

The impacts of climate change are likely to worsen problems that coastal areas already face. Confronting existing challenges that affect man-made infrastructure and coastal ecosystems, such as shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and water pollution, is already a concern in many areas. Addressing the additional stress of climate change may require new approaches to managing land, water, waste, and ecosystems…

Rivers in the Sky

A powerful storm formed above the Pacific Ocean battering the U.S. West Coast seen by a weather satellite in January 2023. (image courtesy of Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere - CIRA - between Colorado State University and NOAA via Space.com).

Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere – like rivers in the sky – that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics. These columns of vapor move with the weather, carrying an amount of water vapor roughly equivalent to the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River. When the atmospheric rivers make landfall, they often release this water vapor in the form of rain or snow…

California faces weeks of cleanup as “one last” major storm lashes state – Axios

Nutan Mellegers, far right, has cheerful cohort of friends pitch in to help cleanup her Sylvan Way home in Felton Grove between downpours on Tuesday © 2023 Shmuel Thaler - Santa Cruz Sentinel.

California was lashed by the final in a series of lethal atmospheric rivers Monday night — as officials warned it could take weeks to clean up the sustained heavy rains, snow and floods that’ve hit the state.

The latest: A mandatory evacuation order was issued for a flooded mobile home park in Acampo after 175 residents left voluntarily earlier Monday, per the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office…